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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

It should be relatively easy using Free Pascal and its FreeVision text-mode UI toolkit. You get all the widgets, menus, scrollbars etc premade, complete with mouse support. They even have the editor widget with syntax highlighting already (in the text mode IDE; not sure if it's in the base library). All that's needed is to replace the default Borland-style shortcuts with CUA.

http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009...

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Speaking of Borland does anyone else remember the Brief editor. Was my goto for about a decade back in the early 90’s. Highly configurable, macros, column select and easily opened giant files.

Brief was excellent, as was the GUI version Crisp. Superb window split implementation.

Nice, loved turbo vision. Wonder if they could update with Unicode characters and 256+ colors?

Unicode would probably be a significant effort. It's actually a Turbo Vision port, and, as I recall, it still uses 8-bit strings, same as original did.

Both would be very hard, my Outliner Lighto [0] program uses the Video unit that Free Vision uses and the main reason it cannot do unicode is that the screen is handled as an array of 8bit pairs (one byte is used for the character and the other byte is used as a pair of 4bit numbers, one for the foreground and one for the background) pretty much the same way that CGA had its text mode. All drawing in Free Vision is done by writing directly to TDrawBuffer types which are basically arrays of such cells. Also Free Vision specifically (this isn't a limitation of the Video unit) has a maximum width limit of 255 characters (technically it is the maximum width of a view, but the "desktop", the menubar, etc are all views).

You'd need a very massive overhaul to introduce unicode and more than 4bit/4bit color pairs to Free Vision.

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol

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