Kryon Labs

Plan 9-inspired UI toolkit in C

Kryon Labs develops software inspired by the Plan 9 operating system philosophy. We believe that everything is a file — and that simple, composable protocols like 9P enable elegant distributed computing.

Our current focus is Kryon, a lightweight UI toolkit written in C using plan9port. It brings Plan 9's elegant "everything is a file" philosophy to modern application development — control your entire UI through simple file I/O operations via the 9P protocol.

Kryon: Plan 9 UI Toolkit

Kryon is a UI toolkit written in C that uses Plan 9 from User Space (plan9port). It provides a simple widget system with a 9P filesystem interface for controlling UI elements.

Architecture

Kryon is built with standard C and Plan 9 tools:

C language: Native C implementation using plan9port compilers
9P protocol: Filesystem-based control interface
Widgets: Labels and buttons with filesystem control
Cross-platform: Runs on Linux via plan9port (/tmp/kry), native on Plan 9 (/n/kry)

Widget System

Kryon provides basic widget types:

WLabel: Text display widgets
WButton: Interactive button widgets with click events

Filesystem Interface

Control every aspect of your UI through the filesystem. The toolkit mounts to /n/kry (or /tmp/kry on Linux) with a face window at /n/face (or /tmp/face). Each widget exposes its text property as a file:

/n/kry/[winid]/[widgetid]/text

For example:
/n/kry/1/1/text    # First widget text
/n/kry/1/2/text    # Second widget text
/n/kry/1/3/text    # Third widget text

/n/face            # Symlink to current window

Building

# Build on Plan 9
$ mk

# Build on Linux with plan9port
$ make

Source Code