Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

by kim_rutherford • 1 year ago

156 33 1 year ago

github.com

kristopolous2• 1 year ago

Reminds me of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView

It'd be interesting to try this concept again on the wildly different computers we have now compared to 40 years ago.

4k monitors, high speed networks, dozens of cores, things are significantly different - might open some wildly exciting and new possibilities

skissane3• 1 year ago

Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows

Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day

eschaton• 1 year ago

This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...

jd3• 1 year ago

I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021

kristopolous2• 1 year ago

I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating.

IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on

boznz• 1 year ago

and Borland Turbovision

ivolimmen• 1 year ago

... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS

nickdothutton• 1 year ago

Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.

icedchai• 1 year ago

I was just about to same the same thing! I remember briefly running DESQview on a 386SX, before installing Linux...

matt3210• 1 year ago

Peak UI for sure!

behnamoh• 1 year ago

Does it support Liquid Glass? :')

snvzz• 1 year ago

Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode.

I wonder if this was ever resolved.

JdeBP5• 1 year ago

It seems to have supported UTF-8 for at least a decade. Although it went the full-on ECMA-35 route of making that an optional switchable character set.

There was an issue back in 2016 where, ironically, it was coming up in Latin-1 mode with everything else around it talking UTF-8, and there have been other similar impedance mis-matches over the years. But they seem to hinge on it actually having UTF-8 support.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/4

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8

However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30

And in some places it even required IBM code page 437.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/22

And some of the doco seems to have never been incorporated.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100

cosmos00725• 1 year ago

Author here :)

I've been using Twin as my everyday terminal emulator and terminal multiplexer since ~2000, slowly adding features as my free time - and other interests - allowed.

As someone pointed out, the look-and-feel reminds Borland Turbo Vision. The reason is simple: I started writing in in the early '90s on DOS with a Borland C compiler, and I used the Borland Turbo Vision look-and-feel as a visual guideline (never actually looked at the code, though).

The porting to linux happened in 1999 (it was basically dormant before that), and Unicode support was progressively added around 2015-2016 (initially UCS-2 i.e. only the lowest 64k codepoints, then full UTF-32 internally, with terminal emulator accepting UTF-8). There are still some missing features, most notably: no grapheme clusters, no fullwidth (asian etc.) support, no right-to-left support.

Right now I'm adding truecolor support (see https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor) - it's basically finished, I'm ironing out some remaining bugs, and thinking whether wire compatibility with older versions is worth adding.

And yes, documentation has been stalled for a very long time.

Retrospectively, I should have switched C -> C++ much earlier: lots of ugly preprocessor macros accumulated over time, and while I rewrote the C widget hierarchy as C++ classes, several warts remain.

Lio• 1 year ago

Glad to see it's still going.

It amuses me that that a project that started in 1993 is still versioned at 0.9.0 for it's latest stable release.

It's a good reminder that version number don't necissarily denote stability.

panzi5• 1 year ago

Wonder if my ansi-img image viewer works in that. Won't compile this from source to test it, but if it's in my Linux distribution I'll do later.

panzi5• 1 year ago

Nope, only garbage output: https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh

Is there a way to configure another terminal font? But it's not just the font, the terminal seems to also crash. At least it's not responsive anymore and has to be closed.

cosmos00725• 1 year ago

You can choose the font with `twin --hs=X11,font=X11FONTNAME` or `twin --hw=xft,font=TRUETYPEFONTNAME`

I will have a look too, the terminal should not crash or stop being responsive

okflo• 1 year ago

I remember somewhen in the 90s, having a 386er Linux system with 8MB RAM, experimenting with twin... So cool, that this project is still alive!

Jotalea• 1 year ago

I wonder if it would be possible to use ANSI escape colors for making gradient window decorations, or simulating transparency on them.

Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

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