Getting help
The best place is GitHub Issues, because the answer is then readable by the next person with the same problem. If you would rather write privately,chris.tham@hellotham.com reaches the same person.
Whatever you use, it helps enormously to include:
- Your macOS version and Mac model.
- The ipnx version, from ipnx → About, and what the emulated machine says when you run
ipnxfetch. - What you did, what happened, and what you expected instead.
- A screenshot if anything looked wrong. A photograph of a screen is fine too — this is a project about terminals.
Things that surprise people
Never force-quit it
This is the one rule that matters. The emulated machine has a filesystem with data in memory that has not reached the disk, exactly as a real one does, and killing the app is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a VAX. Quitting normally is safe — ⌘Q snapshots the running machine and resumes it next time. If you want the machine properly shut down, type this into a shell first:
cd /
sync; sync
/etc/halt
If it is ever force-quit anyway, the next launch runs a filesystem check and repairs itself. That usually works. Usually is doing real work in that sentence:fsck restores consistency, not data.
The keyboard seems dead after resuming
Press Return. A restored session has nothing left to say — the login prompt was printed once, before the snapshot — so the screen can look alive and silent at the same time. The app sends that nudge for you, but if a window looks frozen, Return is the first thing to try.
Backspace, and other 1985 opinions
The Delete key sends ^H, which is what Eighth Edition expects. Interrupt is^C and line-kill is ^U. There is no command history and no completion; sh in 1985 had neither.
File names are short, and case matters
Fourteen characters, maximum, and no exceptions. This is why your Mac home folder is mounted at /n/home rather than being used as the account's home directory — the emulated Unix simply cannot represent many of the names your Mac contains.
It is using CPU while apparently idle
Two processors are running. The VAX idles properly and costs very little; the 5620 terminal does not idle at all, because a real one did not. Closing the 5620 window stops it and gives the core back.
Something is genuinely broken
Start again from a clean machine: Settings → Disk → Reset replaces the emulated disk with the one the app shipped. This erases everything inside the emulated machine — your files there, not on your Mac — so export anything you want first. Files on shared folders are on your Mac and are untouched.
Feature requests and the rest of the project
Very welcome, with one caveat worth stating early: ipnx is a restoration, so "Eighth Edition does not do that" is sometimes the correct and final answer. The interesting question is usually whether the real system could have done it. See theproject notes for where this is going.