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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Not really retro news, since it assumes everyone is using a large window and full-color terminal.

I was hoping to use it with one of my retro machines, and got

  use_default_colors() returned ERR

It should have --monochrome, and --ascii options.

The Unix ethos used to be "run anywhere on anything," but even basic programs like top assume a window of a certain size.

Similarly, Lynx markets itself as being for retro environments, but a number of its flags that would be useful in retro environments are ignored/broken.

Surprisingly (to me), htop is very well-behaved, and works even in tiny windows, or on tiny monochrome screens.

There's more to retro than just being text.

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To be precise, it only assumed 80x25 terminals with 16 colors, which I think fits into some definitions of retro, but I see your point :)

I've just added support for ascii & monochrome modes, and reduced the required screen size to 80x12, which I think is a reasonable minimum for readability.

Would you mind sharing what kind of hardware did you try it on?

You're almost there. But 80x12 is still a bit big for truly retro hardware.

Remember that 80 column screens were not the majority of computers in what we now consider the retro age. 40, 36, and even 32 columns screens were common.

Also, terminals would often have status bars, reducing the amount of vertical real estate. 12 sounds small, but with status indicators active, you're looking at 10 or even 8 usable lines.

Eh, to do it properly, 40 cols and less would require adjusting the whole layout and I just want to keep the code simple. I'm also not sure if the code would be fast enough to run on so old machines, I mean it's Python and not optimized at all. But feel free to fork and tinker if you're interested, at this point it's not really far off.

What commonly used UNIX terminals had less than 80 columns? VT100 had 80 columns, IBM PCs had 80 columns. I remember some 8 bit computers having text modes where you could choose to display less columns in return for getting more colors, but those computers never ran UNIX and getting on usenet was surely a pipe dream.

I agree, any terminal I ever used to access a shared unix host had 80 columns. Typically a VT100 or ADM-3a or something like that.

TRS-80, TI-99, Commodore, Apple etc. home computers had 32, 40, maybe 64 columns and you could get terminal emulator programs for them but most people would use them for CompuServ or America Online, or maybe BBS logins. I think I tried using my TI-99 terminal emulator with a unix host and it wasn't very successful. The host had no idea what my terminal was and operated in a very limited "dumb tty" mode.

Either I am very young or you are very old, because ANYTHING with a fixed 80 column screen is definitely retro. This is a weird thing to gatekeep.

How come it is 80x25 instead of 80x24 (default dimensions for XTerm)?

Interesting, I never noticed that 80x24 resolution. Apparently it's been inherited from VT100.

Now 80x25 was the standard text mode of IBM PC, which I'm much more familiar with. I used it because I was testing (over telnet) on some retro ones.

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