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Comment by mastry | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I cut my programming teeth on the Dr. Dobbs/Al Stevens "D-flat" series which was a text-based windowing system in C. Some of the most fun I've ever had programming. The hardest part was waiting for the next issue to be published!

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Funnily enough, I just happened to have ported D-Flat to macOS and Linux in the last couple of weeks. Check it out (w/screenshots): https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat. It uses a small TUI library that maps multi-byte ANSI/xterm arrow key and mouse wheel inputs into unicode private-use codes for internal processing by D-Flat. It also remaps all of the IBM PC code page 437 characters for unicode output, and converts the entire "PC-compatible" screen image including attributes into ANSI terminal output, thanks to some nice code from the Cosmopolitan Project.

That is great - I starred the repo.

Are the original articles available somewhere?

Yes, they're available on the archived Dr Dobbs Journal DVD V6 (https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6), starting in the May 1991 section, or thereabouts.

I've tried to find the most recent version of that library, even emailing the author, but he's long since moved on and I could only find bits and pieces.

Maybe https://archive.org/details/dflat is best now?

Try https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat, which is D-Flat version 2.0 ported to Linux and macOS.

He eventually ported them into Turbo Pascal as well, that is when I bumped into the series.

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