So funny to see all the cmake instructions. Really makes you want to go back in time. Turbo C or Pascal, hit F9 and you're up and running.
It does showcase our incompetence. In this age we should be able to point to some online compiler and run it. Or download it and run it on a folder. That should be the extent of our involvement with tools. But apparently they are not tools, but rituals we insist on.
My programming career literally started in a dumpster in the ’90s, when I found a Turbo Vision book someone had thrown away. I picked it up and immediately fell in love with the bluish TUIs that anyone could make.
A critical part that is somewhat lost when running this in a terminal is how the mouse behaved on a real text mode screen. It was a yellow block that you moved with the mouse not a mouse pointer.
Anyone tested to run this on a high resolution Linux text mode with GPM?
The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.
Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
it is still very well usable - i used TV 2.0 year ago to do some prototype. i wanted (and mostly succeeded) to create turbovision front end for LLDB debugger... you know, that would behave like Borland's Turbo Debugger.
few quick notes:
- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.
- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.
- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.
- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy
- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement
- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)
overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.
The original version came with Turbo Pascal 6, the C++ port came later.
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
It does showcase our incompetence. In this age we should be able to point to some online compiler and run it. Or download it and run it on a folder. That should be the extent of our involvement with tools. But apparently they are not tools, but rituals we insist on.
There's also this one in C++: https://github.com/kloczek/tvision
The one that comes with FreePascal/Lazarus is written in Pascal.
There's even one in Rust, though it might have been vibe-coded: https://github.com/aovestdipaperino/turbo-vision-4-rust
Anyone tested to run this on a high resolution Linux text mode with GPM?
Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.
This is a cultural treasure.
Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3
It was either the manuals, or getting lucky with magazine articles or local library book selection.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
few quick notes:
- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.
- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.
- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.
- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy
- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement
- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)
overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
"Uses" is keyword in Pascal, for example, so "including" a module by "#define"-ing feels like a "hack"
I guess it doesn't matter, nowadays.
IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910
https://github.com/gansm/finalcut