Hacker News Reader

Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Eh, the Borland Grahics Interface (BGI) style TUIs were kind of awful. I hated the Borland Turbo C IDE in no small part because of that style TUI. It just wasted so much precious character space on TUI frames and other decorations.

More of my fond TUI memories from that era were the bespoke ones in the demo/art/music/bbs scenes. Those in many cases were still character based but seemed to make better use of the screen space and at least more aesthetically pleasing character sets.

Scream Tracker / Impulse Tracker comes to mind as one example:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Screamtracker...

Which you can still enjoy today in a cross-platform clone via SchismTracker:

https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker

View on HN

I love all things text mode.

For anyone searching for the Borland style text interface, it was actually called TurboVision, not BGI (which was a generic graphics library). TurboVision (and many GUIs of the time) largely followed the Common User Interface (CUI) spec by IBM for its interactions in text mode.

It is fair to say there was a lot of screen space devoted to borders and such, especially in 80x25 mode, but that helped make everything super clear and usable.

Ah my bad re: BGI vs. TurboVision, my memory from those days is quite fuzzy!

Only if you were an English speaking user

The IBM spec was CUA( Common User Access) not CUI.

Ah yes, thank you for the correction!

I remember that I loved the Turbo Vision TUI's so much that I dreamed to have a copy of it as a kid. My family wasn't very well off, but I got Borland C++ 2.0 for Christmas. The compiler came with BGI graphics but they were NOT text mode. The library was also awfully slow (drawing a picture by repeatedly calling drawPixel() took minutes)

I don't remember the price of Turbo Vision, but I remember it was obscenely expensive in my third-world eyes. It was sold separately until it was finally bundled with BC++ 3.1 (1992).

Altought I liked Borland IDE's, did't liked their UIs neither. For me the best text UI's ever created were Symantec's, which used some custom icons (ie arrows, buttons), and nicer tech colors:

https://diarywind.com/blog/img/g13/fcf379da7cb57db6feb94d563...

https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/10-for-dos-54195b...

The DOSSHELL included in MS-DOS itself also used some custom graphics, but that was totally optional. The interface was still based around the usual hardware text mode.

In fact, DOS Shell used a real graphics mode as well.

> style TUIs were kind of awful.

You might have disliked them but they were far from awful. They were some of the cleanest TUIs ever designed.

The other screenshot you shared isn’t a TUI by the way. It’s a GUI. It just happens it runs atop of DOS (much like early versions of Windows did). So it’s not really comparable to TurboVision.

Regarding TurboVision, I suspect you might be in the minority with your dislike for them too. Which I guess just goes to prove that everyone will have different preferences and thus you can’t please everyone all of the time.

Pretty sure ScreamTracker ran in text mode, so it's a TUI. It just used a custom font, instead of most TUIs using the stock BIOS or video card font.

It has bevels made up of 3 colours, so I can’t see how it’s pure text mode. It’s certainly text heavy so they could have drawn the GUI int a frame buffer and then just used text mode for screen updates. But that’s a little disingenuous from being a TUI.

Impulse Tracker uses VGA 80x50 text mode.

https://github.com/herrnst/impulsetracker/blob/master/IT_S.A...

http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0069.htm

You guys are still missing my point that it’s not a TUI because non-text elements have been drawn to the frame buffer. This is actually a lot easier to do in DOS than it is in UNIX too by virtue of the fact that DOSs text mode isn’t a pseudo-teletype. In fact this is a trick I used to do all the time when writing software back in the 80s: draw a UI then fallback to printing characters for UI updates.

For that tracker to be a proper TUI it would have to use text characters for all of the UI elements, bevels included. You simply couldn’t do those 3-tone bevels with any alt character sets, let alone an 8-bit one from the era of DOS.

Are you sure? It seems to me that they were probably replacing some text characters with their own sprites instead. They could still be text characters, just redefined for their purposes.

What frame buffer? There is no frame buffer. It runs in text mode, thus it's a TUI. Would you consider Norton's text-mode interfaces not TUIs because they would redefine some characters for window chrome and a mouse pointer?

Even cooler when viewed in motion https://youtu.be/XRawUKO2Qy8?t=5848

Wows thats a pretty cool track. Foregone Destruction at 1h 30m.

Thank you for the excellent link!

I remember back then my editor of choice in DOS was QEdit. I think it used up less space with its menus, although it's funny to think I enjoy using vim today whereas back then in my youth it may have been too much for me.

I do miss the simple UI offered by some BBSes (as well as their message editors, like in Renegade BBS). A lot of that is just nostalgia, of course.

Compared with modern UIs where you don't know where an UI element begins or ends or with gray font on gray background (or like this text field on my phone where the cursor does not advances when i press space) those UIs were a blessing.

Impulse Tracker, which was intended as an advanced Screamtracker clone also features character map graphics to show sample data. It was kind of mind-blowing back in the day to have a text-mode DOS tool with pseudo graphics.

Hmm.....

That same thing in say 96x50 would feel much better.

Edit, just viewed your tracker link! Yes, exactly.

I have to agree… I plan to re-skin https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js with this in mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com