Turbo Vision port to the GNU compiler (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Vision port to the GNU compiler (2009)

tvision.sourceforge.net

29 pointsnetworked18 comments

I just had an extended discussion on IRC the other day regarding Turbo Vision and console applications.

I had a short project of my own I wanted to do to replace a webapp I depend on, where the core is no more than 5 tables with a simple CRUD and a report. Using any web stack for this is absurd, dbase or a console app would be perfect as I prefer to work over ssh.

Imagine my dismay when I found there are virtually no options for making console applications with any modern tools. Even the ncurses wrappers are ignored or missing (ie: Python).

While the topic is hot, can anyone recommend an OSS or commercial application you can still use on Linux to make fast small console apps without dropping to C and Ncurses?

This is a good use case for Tcl/Tk. Tcl scripting gives you database access with a pretty modern-ish language, and Tk is a basic but decent (and totally cross-platform) GUI scripting toolkit.

TUI != GUI.

Urwid is cool, but still doesn't have very high-level widgets like Turbo Vision did to my knowledge.

I have looked at npyscreen too. Both are lower level to my knowledge.

This library was awesome for a time. I had used Turbo Pascal in the early 90's and had really liked the text gui.

When this port came out, I made my own "CUA" text mode editor on linux (really just a streamlined feature cut from setedit) and it worked fantastically for years. So much better than nano and other lame unix attempts at simple editors. Anyone who had been exposed to the DOS editor would pick it up immediately.

The problem was the library was only briefly packaged up, and early on it fell out of whatever distro I had at the time and was never picked up again.

It's a shame because that editor would have been awesome for beginners, though it had quite a few power features, such as syntax highlighting etc from setedit/rhide.

Glorious pictures here:

http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/images.html

That's a different port (From the original article at the head of the thread, Sergio Sigala's port [0]-- which you link to the screenshots of -- is a different port targeting fewer platforms and with a 100% compatibility target, while the one in the article targeted more platforms, and compromised compatibility for security/usability improvements.)

Both ports seem to be inactive (the current version of Sigala's per its page is the same 0.8 that was the latest version at the time of the 2009 post of the original article), but there seems to be at least one more-recently-active fork of Sigala's port on Github. [1]

[0] http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/index.html

[1] https://github.com/benwbooth/tvision

It can still be useful. I work more and more on the console, remoting from the laptop to the work desktop. I love midnight-commander, mcview, and use (heh) tig (actually a git pager) for normal pager (instead of more, less, etc.). Along with emacs/vi/zile/mg/whatever is there. Won't mind a terminal mode debugger with some menus in there, that reflects what Turbo Pascal Debugger was (loved it back in the days)

I practically learned OOP making an application in Turbo Pascal using the Turbo Vision library. I even bought the Pascal source code for Turbo Vision ($200 IIRC) Primarily to find a bug where when you pressed a pull down menu item, and there was a button on the window below the menu item, the mouse event for the menu item also triggered the button below. It turned out there was a patch downloadable from a Borland BBS, but boy it was learning digging through the source and finding and fixing that one inlined assembler opcode which was wrong. Dissecting the patch one could see that it contained a workaround, not a direct fix of the bug. Today there's a lot of open source to learn from. Not at all common at that time.

I have fond memories of using rhide. I wish they make a comeback as a modern TUI ide.

Turbo Vision was a library of forms and controls for Borland Turbo Languages. You didn't need Windows to make an easy to use program. It ran in DOS.

I can see this being useful for GNU/Linux programs that run in the shell.

On the shell, we have Curses. How is Turbo Vision different?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.develo...

Turbo Vision gives text based menus and text based controls to make an easier to use program in the terminal.

All I remember from Turbo Vision is the insane amount of brackets that were used in the demos for building a GUI/TUI control hierarchy.

I'll take the Turbo Technojock Toolkit any day over TV if I get sent back in a time warp.

...and now just VCL port to GCC please!

Is this project dead?

Yes, only waiting to be resurrected.

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