A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0

github.com

101 pointspjmlp18 comments

Awesome. Loved Turbo Pascal back in the day.

A port happened before didn't it? I remember setedit and rhide about twenty years ago. At that time I was desperate for a CUA editor under Linux. So, I stripped down setedit and made my own simple editor in the tradition of dos edit and nano. That worked for a number of years but the tvision? lib was removed from Debian and I couldn't build the editor any longer.

Couple of years later I found the ne editor and that was decent, and two or so years ago found micro, which is better than I could do myself. But these others are all missing that special something, the final polish of having a complete widget set like turbo vision.

Looks like this port got a lot farther on Unicode, awesome! However, 16 colors? Don't think I can handle that any longer, just too spoiled. And C++, am too lazy, haha. Unlikely anyone is using DOS any longer, maybe freedos but still. Also, windows console is in maintenance only these days. Everyone is moving to Windows terminal and for good reason. Focus on win console instead of full ansi support may be suboptimal, not sure yet.

All in all my dream would be to perhaps port Qt to a TUI or make a wxTerminal so we could write apps in Python as well. Without funding though will probably never happen.

> A port happened before didn't it? I remember setedit and rhide about twenty years ago.

Yeah. SET published their port on GitHub a few months ago:

https://github.com/set-soft/tvision

One of the motivations to undertake this project was when I realized SET's Turbo Vision didn't support UTF-8 (https://github.com/windoze/tvision/issues/5).

> However, 16 colors?

This is not a design choice of mine. It's what the original Turbo Vision supported and I still haven't gotten around to extend it.

> Also, windows console is in maintenance only these days. Everyone is moving to Windows terminal and for good reason.

Using the Win32 Console API doesn't imply that applications will only work in the legacy Windows console. Windows Terminal supports this, as well as any terminal taking advantage of the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY) API (i.e. Git Bash).

From a programmer's perspective, using ANSI escape sequences to display text is fairly simple (and is what Turbo Vision does). But processing input is a pain in the ass, as it requires a complex VT sequence parser. So I stuck with the Console API for input. Anyway, there would be no problem in replacing the current console I/O strategy with something entirely different or even having many of them and picking one at runtime.

> Unlikely anyone is using DOS any longer, maybe freedos but still.

That's what I thought, until someone opened an issue and explained they were building for DOS... (https://github.com/magiblot/tvision/issues/20).

But still, I don't see the point in removing features that are already there if they are not a deterrent for further development. So DOS support is staying for now.

Thanks for the info.

You would like wpe back in the day.

Borland C++ and Turbo Vision were a killer combo back in the DOS times. Borland's decline over the years was painful to watch. I guess that what happens to the engineering driven companies that get overtaken by the MBA types.

I was worried this would be like some other "modern ports" using electron or some other overkill-to-made-coding-easier framework but was pleasantly surprised. Even retained DOS support, excellent!

How nice! It has been a few years since I started thinking of doing something similar. I have used Turbo Vision a lot in the past, both within Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++. This project seems very solid: I enjoyed reading how much care was spent in dealing with UTF8 encoding!

Haha nice! I also have been hacking transparency and limited utf8 into the turbo vision source code for my weird kodi like project, but your work seems way better !

https://github.com/ivans5/BitMediaCentre

Damn. That "lib/system.cc" in Sigala's port is such a mess. You must have had a tough time tweaking it.

I was not aware of your project, thanks for sharing it.

Can I use it from any modern Pascal environments? This brings back fond memories of turbo Pascal

There is a Pascal version as well, https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision

What a blast from the past. I loved creating apps with TV and TP. Well done, not just nostalgia either!

Thought this was awesome, until I find it's based on the lessor of the two Borland products, C++, and not Pascal.

back then I used Turbo Pascal first and dabble in its Turbo Vision before knowing the C++ counterpart. For me, the C++ version looks like a port of the Pascal one. IIRC, it even has "uses" like construct. So, for me, the "true" TV is the Pascal one.

It is, just like OWL, VCL and FireMonkey are.

The culture at Borland, and subsequent renamings, was always Object Pascal first and C++ would built on top of it.

Still I keep waiting for the day that Visual C++ actually deserves the Visual moniker by offering a C++ Builder like tooling experience.

It was nice to use to bring GUI type controls to text programs.

Nice! What apps have you created so far that use it?

They list some in the README.md at

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision#applications

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