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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

Who knew Turbo Vision was still being used — much less updated, Unicode, cross platform, 24-bit color?

I’ve been struggling around issues in .Net Terminal.GUI v2 recently and it really made me miss the OG solid terminal UI library. Silly thing is back when this was a thing I didn’t even use it at the time.

I found this repo linked: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

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FWIW Free Vision that comes with Free Pascal is also updated and is also based on the original Turbo Vision that Borland released under public domain back in the 90s. Free Vision is used for the text-mode IDE that comes with Free Pascal and is ported to almost much every supported platform.

And the Free Pascal TUI IDE is lightning fast.

Also check out Final Cut

https://github.com/gansm/finalcut

> FINAL CUT is a powerful and lightweight C++ library for creating terminal-based applications with numerous text-based widgets.

it's cool, but the name sucks when there is final cut pro

Well, as the author says in the FAQ, he's been using the name Final Cut since 1991, whereas the famous video editing software appeared in 1999. Now, given how well-known the latter became, a name change would certainly be reasonable if he wanted to avoid confusion, improve find-ability in web search, etc. But, I get the impression that's not among his priorities, and it's his project, so...

Wow, even better looking than TV, using the full power of Unicode and a custom font. Always new it was possible but haven’t seen it done yet.

Reminds me a bit of the later versions of the old Norton DOS utils.

^knew

Yeah what a joyful blast from the past! I love that whole aesthetic; the best of the DOS days IMO.

Terminal.GUI v2 is very promising and a delight. But documentation was not 100% there last I used it this summer.

There was always this nagging doubt - is it buggy or don't I understand how to use it? In the end, I finished my little internal tool and was happy with it. Would try again.

I had exactly the same problem. I ended up getting a copy of its source and pointing Claude at it, which insisted there were bugs - but, its fixes were not reliable, and I wasn't even sure if its assessments were correct, or the docs were wrong or out of date, or I was simply misusing it and misleading the AI through those expectations.

The docs point so strongly at using v2 instead of v1, but I just don't get the sense it's reliable, and I feel 'stuck' for a good Terminal UI library for .Net now.

I don't think there is a perfect fit, unfortunately. The best one can do is probably call out to one of the native code libraries, but that has an impractical distribution story in .Net for many use cases.

The best of DOS, such as it was.

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