Show HN: Turbokod – A Retro IDE

boxed.github.io

4 points·boxed··6 comments

Code at: https://github.com/boxed/turbokod

I've used Claude a TON to build this, I freely admit. It started out as an experiment on how good Claude was at porting the C++ codebase for TurboVision to Mojo (fairly good), and then if I could build a simple editor, then I sort of got carried away and wondered if I could replace my daily driver PyCharm.

I'm now on ~4 days of using this as my daily driver, so it's going well. For Django development I did have to make my own LSP with Django special features too: https://github.com/boxed/iommi_lsp

I do like the pastiche software advertisement page, the coupon cutout is a nice touch. Did you do that with Claude too, or was that hand-rolled?

Claude code, second attempt, plus some editing of course.

Nice job! As someone who is also working on a TUI-inspired editor, this is very cool.

Having basically zero knowledge about about Mojo though, it might be nice to place a FAQ section in the repo to expand a bit more on the decision to use it, how the port differs from Turbovision, etc.

It's mostly that I believe in Mojo having a strong future and I wanted to try it a bit. And after a while it felt like I was committed.

I love retro UIs, and this one even more, because of course it reminds of Turbo Pascal, which was so cool.

Great job!

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