thinking is hard. there is a sweet spot somewhere between ease of use and knowing what you're trying to accomplish in the first place.
once you learn the system, you can get a lot of mileage out of in-built system features, such as shell commands, lists (variables), functions, and pipelines. file interfaces and private namespaces make these simple primitives even more powerful than they are on presumably more familiar unix systems. (it has to be said: unix users already don't seem to get much mileage out of existing unix features.) rio is scriptable, and all of its features are exposed to file interfaces and text commands. that's a huge steering wheel, even if your hands are small. all the cosmetic stuff new users typically complain about can be modified with a minimum of knowledge and skill. this is a benefit of the terse, simple programming style. sometimes, even a deficient program can be better than a featureful one, if the deficient program is simple and easy to modify. just implement whatever it is you actually want to do. some people would say this is ugly: http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/rio/img/20190415.png sl
