C Programming on System 6 | Hacker News Reader

C Programming on System 6

jcs.org

56 pointsbehnamoh11 comments

Been playing around with Think C on my old macs after seeing these videos and it’s great bc fun but I really miss my modern vim. Does anyone know if it’s possible to cross compile or something? (Tried a shared folder with apple share but the resource fork of the source file gets clobbered)

System 6 is older than me so I don’t know all the stuff that people do from back in the day.

Getting Vim to run on a Macintosh Plus with System 6 is actually a project I’m currently working on. The old Mac Vim binary versions 5.7 and 6.2 will only run on System 7 and up, and in my testing require a computer with color capabilities.

Progress is slow. There’s a lot of surface area; Vim’s codebase, the Macintosh toolbox routines, getting the code to build with CodeWarrior in a VM, setting up all the right libraries, and then running/testing it in a different VM.

Current status is that Vim can startup and you can enter text and quasi save it to a file. Movement commands work. But there’s a LOT more to do.

Resources to get started for those who may be curious:

https://github.com/vim/vim-history/ older source code, I’m currently working off the 6.2.350 tag

https://vintageapple.org/ amazing site for technical info

https://macintoshgarden.org/ resource for old Mac software

May be easier with one of the derivatives which come in with smaller code bases.

Cross-development tools here: https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

And a setup walkthrough: https://henlin.net/2021/12/03/a-simplified-guide-to-developm...

Amazing thanks!

I'm pretty sure vi/m needs a proper terminal, so... actually that might not be surmountable, given that there were probably BBS clients back then. But I suspect it would be easier to write a file system adapter that could let you safely share the files then to try and support a modern program in that kind of resource constrained environment.

Oh yeah that sounds nearly intractable for me, I actually wanted to work on a modern Mac and deploy to a classic Mac

I’d guess nearly a whole terminal was implemented for vim 5 on classic macs: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/vim

Knowing vim, there has to be a classic Mac version.

I think I vaguely remember running this in Mini vMac:

http://www.afturgurluk.org/mirrors/macintosh/macvim.org_MacC...

Caveat emptor :P

Dude has an original kensington trackball. Mad props

"Hello Cyberpals!" he started with. That's instant coolness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com