Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

by begoon • 4 years ago

214 92 4 years ago

Wow, this is a throwback. I'm suddenly sat in front of my Amstrad PC as an early teenager poking around DOS tools I don't understand.

pantulis2• 4 years ago

My throwback is reading through sheets and sheets of continuous form paper printed with the Turbo Vision demos and being utterly unable the wrap my head around the object oriented code. Still I learned a lot by annotating that source code.

bananaboy2• 4 years ago

Hah I was just looking at this recently. I was looking for a C# version. I couldn't find anything nice though. There's this https://github.com/elw00d/consoleframework but it looks like it hasn't been updated in a long time.

pantulis2• 4 years ago

Have you tried Miguel de Icaza's gui.cs?

https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs

bananaboy2• 4 years ago

I looked at that but it didn't look enough like Turbo Vision for me :)

v-yadli• 4 years ago

C#? Tick.

Console? Tick.

TurboVision theme? Tick. (lol)

https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia

TUI (Text User Interface) (GUI Framework) implementation for Avalonia UI
Supports XAML, data bindings, animation, styling and the rest from Avalonia.

the-dude2• 4 years ago

I bought a mouse specifically for this. It was a Genius and came with a holder which you could stick to the side of your monitor or to a wall.

So you could store your mouse when not in use. I am not making this up.

WalterGR• 4 years ago

Mouse holders are still manufactured, believe it or not.

sdfjkl2• 4 years ago

It also had a ball that you had to remove every third day or so and then clean the friction rollers inside the mouse which the ball was turning. All the dust the ball picked up transferred onto those rollers and coagulated into dense felt around them until they stopped turning.

Mine had three buttons though!

a_e_k• 4 years ago

My standard kit still includes a pair of fine-point forceps from my dad's lab that he gave to me for cleaning mice when I went off to college. It's been a long time since I used them for mice, but they're now really handy for charging ports.

LilBytes• 4 years ago

I found that incredibly satisfying to clean though!

dual_dingo2• 4 years ago

Genius GM6000? I had that one and still use the cutting side of the combined mousepad/cutting mat that came with it.

the-dude2• 4 years ago

Green. Outstanding quality.

vasac• 4 years ago

I had the same one :) - https://youtu.be/GiFWLSdFAuA

owl57• 4 years ago

I am confident that Turbo Vision can now meet many of the expectations of modern users and programmers.

Probably needs help with porting to node.js though: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision/issues/27#issuecomment-8...

sdfjkl2• 4 years ago

Turbo Vision is odd. It's a backport of a graphical UI (Windows 3.0) to text mode. It was exceptionally well done in both end user and developer ease of use and caught on.

But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications. Keep evolving!

dual_dingo2• 4 years ago

IIRC both Windows and TV where modeled after the IBM Common User Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) interface style, which was a somewhat big theme in the late 80s and early 90s.

dugmartin2• 4 years ago

Its fun seeing some of the vestigial CUA key bindings in modern apps. The one I probably use the most is F5 in the browser to refresh the page. That is listed in your Wikipedia page:

If applicable to the page/screen in question F5 provides a refresh function;

digisign6• 4 years ago

Also influenced by the original Mac UI, which influenced Motif, which influenced later toolkits. It was a great time for standard interfaces, which has gotten worse since, imho.

hdjjhhvvhga• 4 years ago

But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications.

Why do you think so? When I came across the first Newt apps years later (Red Hat installer and tools) I was actually surprised how less user-friendly and intuitive these newer TUIs were wen compared to TV.

One big advantage of TV was that it was consistent: when you learned how to use one app, you more or less knew how to use all other TV-based apps.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

There were text mode UIs well before Windows 3.0 - Microsoft had their own TUIs, similar to Turbo Vision but with a subtly different style. They even supported a "monochrome mode" option that wouldn't look out of place on a VT-100 terminal.

digisign6• 4 years ago

Also reminded of the Norton DOS tools, which were interesting in themselves.

qbasic_forever6• 4 years ago

You're not wrong, I remember a lot of turbo vision apps loved to use the MDI, multiple document interface, paradigm where each application was like a mini OS with unique windows you could resize and place as you please. This was fine when you were in DOS and could only run one application at a time, entirely fullscreen. But nowadays MDI on a multitasking OS with multiple things running at once is a weird anachronism, like you're running an OS inside an OS. It's confusing and not good.

You can use turbo vision for good interfaces though. Just have to be careful not to fall into the tropes of 30 year old pre-multitasking OS application design.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

MDI is completely optional in TUI apps. It only enters the picture if you have multiple documents open within the same terminal/app session, otherwise you simply get the single document view. This applies to Emacs "windows" as much as any TUI in DOS.

digisign6• 4 years ago

This is usually handled by tabs today... not sure that has been ported back to libs like turbo vision yet. I don't think so.

tluyben2• 4 years ago

Nice work!

magiblot5• 4 years ago

Thank you very much!

andrewshadura5• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

lproven• 4 years ago

Very important point, this.

But of course Borland could fix that quite easily.

ilaksh2• 4 years ago

Man I hope you are wrong.. because I was literally planning to build an IDE for Algorand/Python/PyTEAL with this (I know, mentioning Algorand is an automatic downvote, oh well).

You might be right.. but I am not sure. Could Borland really sue you or something, many years they release the full source code "as is", "provided gratuitously", "no support", "no updates"? I mean it doesn't explicitly say "public domain", but if someone built software using this and then Borland tried to claim ownership of it or something, would that not be some kind of trap? It seems like any reasonable court would not allow that.. I would like to believe anyway.

DISCLAIMER AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY: Borland does not make or give any representation or warranty with respect to the usefulness or the efficiency of this software, it being understood that the degree of success with which equipment, software, modifications, and other materials can be applied to data processing is dependent upon many factors, many of which are not under Borland's control. ACCORDINGLY, THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS' WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING NO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NONINFRINGEMENT. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED GRATUITOUSLY AND, ACCORDINGLY, BORLAND SHALL NOT BE LIABLE UNDER ANY THEORY FOR ANY DAMAGES SUFFERED BY YOU OR ANY USER OF THE SOFTWARE. BORLAND WILL NOT SUPPORT THIS SOFTWARE AND IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO ISSUE UPDATES TO THIS SOFTWARE.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE GENERALITY OF THE FOREGOING, NEITHER BORLAND NOR ITS SUPPLIERS SHALL BE LIABLE FOR (a) INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL OR INDIRECT DAMAGES OF ANY SORT, WHETHER ARISING IN TORT, CONTRACT OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF BORLAND HAS BEEN INFORMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES, OR (b) FOR ANY CLAIM BY ANY OTHER PARTY. SOME STATES DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS LIMITATION AND EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. Use, duplication or disclosure by the Government is subject to restrictions set forth in subparagraphs (a) through (d) of the Commercial Computer-Restricted Rights clause at FAR 52.227-19 when applicable, or in subparagraph (c) (1) (ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013, and in similar clauses in the NASA AR Supplement. Contractor / manufacturer is Borland International, Inc., 100 Borland Way, Scotts Valley, CA 95066.

andrewshadura5• 4 years ago

I hope I am wrong. But I don't see anywhere in the text of this license any explicit permission to use it for any purpose, it's basically only a warranty disclaimer, unless some bits were omitted by accident.

andrewshadura5• 4 years ago

For anything Python, I recommend you try rich/textual.

magiblot5• 4 years ago

I very much doubt you can get into trouble for using Turbo Vision as an external dependency. There are already projects using it, e.g. https://github.com/electroly/tmbasic.

dvdkon• 4 years ago

Wikipedia says there was an official Borland public domain release of the source code, which this is probably based on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

andrewshadura5• 4 years ago

Yes, you're right.

andrewshadura5• 4 years ago

I stand corrected, but the license statement should be updated to clearly state the actual license, as it currently only includes the warranty disclaimer.

Andrew_nenakhov• 4 years ago

Btw those text based interfaces are better than most gui/web interfaces of today.

miohtama• 4 years ago

Windows 95 was the peak of good UX, like the ancient Greek was the peak of statue crafting. Some things were better in the past.

rahoulb• 4 years ago

Personally I'd say MacOS 9 was the peak (ignoring its instability).

Things like:

* the filesystem root being the desktop - so you started navigation from the first thing you saw when you switched the computer on

* the way the finder remembered the exact layout of your folder windows (if you've not experienced it, it's hard to explain why it's better - but Windows Explorer and the current Mac Finder are both file browsers, whereas the old Mac Finder *was* your desktop in whatever state you left it)

* kernel extensions being switched on and off by dragging them in and out of the extensions folder

These things made the GUI match the actual underlying system - whereas I always felt that Windows 95 onwards (and now OSX/macOS) hide the workings under pretty layers).

Having said that I also used Turbo Vision in the olden days and it was fantastic.

tonyedgecombe2• 4 years ago

Windows 95 was unreliable, NT Workstation 4.0 was better.

stjohnswarts4• 4 years ago

I kind of agree. I think that while it's getting a little bit bloated that xfce4 still pushes the right buttons for a gui for me. Simple, lots of good shortcuts by default, nice simple launcher, and you can tweak til your heart's content (but I don't really anymore). I love xfce4 combined with the whiskers launcher, it does what I need.

protomyth2• 4 years ago

The accountants where I work felt all the GUI interfaces sucked compared to their terminal. This led us to buy a new iSeries. It will probably last the same 15 years as the last one.

tonyedgecombe2• 4 years ago

I remember one place I worked where we ripped out all of the dumb terminals on a UNIX system and replaced them with Windows 3.1 PC's with terminal emulation. Productivity was noticeably down after the change.

bluedino• 4 years ago

They're faster than web based apps that's for sure.

qbasic_forever6• 4 years ago

Definitely not as good as the web, if only for zero accessibility. With the web you have a DOM of semantic elements that are all carefully marked up by hand to describe the intent and meaning of everything. With turbo vision and TUIs you have a buffer of bytes with text, graphics, background, etc. all using the same character set. Good luck if you're a screen reader trying to make sense of it.

But you can have TUI style on the web, this tui.css project is absolutely amazing IMHO: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

dugmartin2• 4 years ago

Turbo Vision was very fun to use and I made a good bit of money contracting on small projects in grad school in the early 90s using it. It made writing text mode guis a breeze. Borland's later Object Windows Library (OWL) was, in my opinion, much clunkier but it was done in C++ compared to Turbo Vision's Pascal.

Probably the most interesting app I did was a small quality control/stats app for this book: "Quality Control 4th Edition" (https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Control-Dale-H-Besterfield/dp...). All the data entry used Turbo Vison and all the graphs and charts used BGI (Borland Graphics Interface). It was meant for student use but I found out later it was used by Jim Beam on their whiskey distillery production line.

tssva• 4 years ago

There were Pascal and C++ versions of Turbo Vision. This version is based upon the C++ version Borland released into the public domain in 1997.

pjmlp3• 4 years ago

Turbo Vision and OWL started as Turbo Pascal frameworks and were later ported to C++.

Delphi continues this tradition, most VCL components are implemented in Delphi, even those shipped in C++ Builder.

enriquto• 4 years ago

It reminds me of the great rhide, of djgpp fame. It was a similar project.

magiblot5• 4 years ago

RHIDE uses this other Turbo Vision port: https://github.com/set-soft/tvision. It depends on the custom API extensions of that port, so it's not compatible with mine.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

AIUI, the FreeDOS project still maintains DJGPP and RHIDE.

stjohnswarts4• 4 years ago

This was what I learned c++ on and I'm very nostalgic for those (mostly) care free days in college :)

michaelsbradley• 4 years ago

See also Final Cut:

https://github.com/gansm/finalcut

abotsis• 4 years ago

This is great! A Python wrapper would be awesome!

jrm4• 4 years ago

Broadly, love seeing projects like this. Entirely too much wheel reinvention going on, well, everywhere in software. Let's go back, see what worked pretty well for a long while, and just updated or rewrite it to similar specs. Any more things going on like this?

nine_k• 4 years ago

It also worked under certain assumptions.

- No concurrency whatsoever.

- No Unicode support.

- In particular, no wide characters support (Chinese, Japanese, emoji).

Not that these are unsurmountable difficulties. But they need to be addressed before jumping to use the good old ways.

stjohnswarts4• 4 years ago

Doesn't his comment about rewriting it answer all those questions though but keep the core of the principles of the software intact?

wiz21c• 4 years ago

I've already asked the question, but is there a way to embed this in a regular app ? I mean, if I want to have a "retro" like GUI but I don't want to bother my users with opening a terminal/console, can I embed this ?

The thing I'm thinking about would be to extract the alacritty render code and make it a library... But that's sure not easy to do...

qbasic_forever6• 4 years ago

IMHO I would pop a web view and load an HTML page with tui.css. It's seriously impressive looking and much easier to integrate in a modern gui system, electron app, etc.: https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

bonzini• 4 years ago

You can use the vte library to embed a terminal in a GTK+ program. QEMU does it for example.

kmstout• 4 years ago

Or you could make a launcher for your app that (attempts to) determine whether it needs to launch a terminal and does the right thing. Something like

  my-beautiful-console-app
  ========================
  #! /bin/bash

  if tty -s; then
    exec my-beautiful-console-app-for-realz "$@"
  else
    exec xterm -e my-beautiful-console-app-for-realz "$@"
  fi

might be a start.

pkaye• 4 years ago

Now we replace it with fifty million JavaScript libraries for a web interface.

qbasic_forever6• 4 years ago

Why not both? https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

rezaprima• 4 years ago

IIRC C++'s TurboVision is port of Pascal's one. Like the

  #define Uses_TKeys

line is from something like

  uses Tkeys

in Pascal

pjmlp3• 4 years ago

Yes, Borland was always Turbo Pascal first (then C++), the same was with OWL, VCL and now FireMonkey.

The difference being that with Delphi/C++ Builder that made C++ extensions to interop with Delphi's object model, as such it is even the same code and no longer a port like in TV and OWL predecessors.

MrYellowP• 4 years ago

W o W ! :O

richardfey• 4 years ago

This is awesome! I would prefer to use it with Pascal though; will give it a try anyways!

magiblot5• 4 years ago

If you want Pascal, this might be what you want: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision

digisign6• 4 years ago

This looks awesome, but not packaged yet?

For a decade or two I waited for a good CUA editor on Unix. One that took advantage of 1990s PC hardware. Like DOS Edit, but better. Built my own striped-down SET/RHIDE editor in the early 2000s, then hobbled along with "ne" from ~2010, but that niche was fully taken by micro a few years ago. Would love a friendly tvision-like competitor with real menus and dialogs.

But what about the color palette? I see one screenshot with an extended palette, but the main shots that are using the original eight-color palette. Maybe nostalgia shots, ok. Was acceptable to have saturated dark blue and dark green backgrounds in ~1990 I suppose, that's all there was. But no longer. A micro/sublime-like dark grey color theme of at least 256 colors would attract new folks more effectively. Backgrounds should have a low-saturation imho.

aghilmort• 4 years ago

fun memories -- that + monochrome channel adapter was first dual-monitor setup can actively recall using

chajath• 4 years ago

Can rhide be built with this new tv? If so that will be the only ide I'll use and I'll never leave

magiblot5• 4 years ago

No, it can't. RHIDE needs specifically this one: https://github.com/set-soft/tvision. If it may interest you, there's a precompiled RHIDE binary in https://github.com/set-soft/tvision/tree/master/rhide_bin/li....

lastdong• 4 years ago

Fond memories :) great to see it on github!

password43212• 4 years ago

TUIs | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30704923: ~200 comments 3 days ago.

password43212• 4 years ago

Free Vision, with Unicode | https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Free_Vision#Unicode_vers...

basically an improved Turbo Vision for Free Pascal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30704923#30711820

Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

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