Going sort of the other way, making an X version of a Borland-like ui, a long time ago I liked XWPE for a while. Even built it for SCO.
It seems like an interesting project as well! I'd love to see it one day
Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#12FYI The classical Borland text user inteface (TUI) framework used in Turbo Pascal and other terminal MS-DOS editors is open source. Turbo Vision: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
that's cool! so this is the turbo-* vision part, but the *-pascal part is not included? is there one of those anybody knows about? I have the source to a turbo pascal BRIDGE.PAS card game player I used to enjoy playing. (it's not a good bridge player and it has a scoring bug, but I know how to fix it, and I can run it in dosbox if I want so I'm not desperate in that sense, but I'd rather run native)
Free Pascal comes with Free Vision. FV has some weird history in that Borland released their C++ conversion of Turbo Vision to public domain, then someone converted that to Turbo Pascal and converted it to use graphics instead of textmode (with coordinates in pixels, etc) and then it was ported to Free Pascal and converted back to text mode and to use Free Pascal's cross platform text mode units. The Free Pascal IDE that comes with the compiler is made using Free Vision and Free Vision works on pretty much any platform Free Pascal itself supports (as long as it has some form of text mode).
Regardless of the history, the API is basically the same, you can even read a tutorial written for Turbo Vision and apply it to Free Pascal with minimal changes.
Recently there has been a UTF-8 version (original TP -and FV- was made for 8bit DOS character codes) though it is a big buggy and slower than the non-UTF-8 version. I tried to use to make an Info viewer[0] some months ago but i had to switch to the non-UTF-8 version due to the bugs.
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#13FYI The classical Borland text user inteface (TUI) framework used in Turbo Pascal and other terminal MS-DOS editors is open source. Turbo Vision: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
It's awesome. Free Pascal IDE is based on this I think. It certainly something to aspire to :) thanks for sharing
It isn't, Free Vision (Free Pascal's own Turbo Vision library) has a much more weird history though it is indirectly based on the C++ code Borland released back in the 90s, like the version linked here (see my other comment). They have a common ancestor but they are different "branches".
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#14Love the look, definitely throwing me back to the halcyon QBasic days.
Slightly related but another way to simulate a retro text editor (old school raster style green screen aesthetic in this instance) is to combine the "cool-retro-term" terminal with the minimal editor "micro".
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#15QB64 is an EDIT.COM-style IDE and a compiler for QuickBasic .BAS programs: https://github.com/QB64Official/qb64#usage
There's a QBjs, for QuickBasic on the web.
There's a QB64 vscode extension: https://github.com/QB64Official/vscode
Textual has a MarkdownViewer TUI control with syntax highlighting and a file tree in a side panel like NERDtree, but not yet a markdown editor.
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's awesome. Free Pascal IDE is based on this I think. It certainly something to aspire to :) thanks for sharing
It isn't, Free Vision (Free Pascal's own Turbo Vision library) has a much more weird history though it is indirectly based on the C++ code Borland released back in the 90s, like the version linked here (see my other comment). They have a common ancestor but they are different "branches".
I see, thanks for the clarification. Btw, I really enjoyed YT "Making a game in Free Pascal" back in the day. I did learn a lot from your video :) Pascal is one of my top languages to code in! Nice to see you around here
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#17When you mentioned retro I was expecting something like editline. Now I feel old.
Anyways, the TUI on mainstream MS-DOS 6.22 and Borland from those days were incomparable to anything on mainstream Linux even on these days. For some reason Linux is the king of text mode and yet never had a proper TUI tradition.
Thank you for sharing the project. Compiled well on my side, looking forward to the next developments. My (unrequested) feedback:
+ consider renaming from C-edit (uppercase) to lower case c-edit, because it is simpler to type from the terminal.
+ the animations of the spining part on top was distracting
+ some menus missing to implement functionality, didn't test copy&paste
+ mouse support would be nice, albeit optional but would complete the MS-DOS 6.22 / borland style since it supported mouse there too
Thank you.
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#18QB64 is an EDIT.COM-style IDE and a compiler for QuickBasic .BAS programs: https://github.com/QB64Official/qb64#usage There's a QBjs, for QuickBasic on the web. There's a QB64 vscode extension: https://github.com/QB64Official/vscode Textual has a MarkdownViewer TUI control with syntax highlighting and a file tree in a side panel like NERDtree, but not yet a markdown editor.
Interesting project. Thanks for sharing! :)
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#19When you mentioned retro I was expecting something like editline. Now I feel old. Anyways, the TUI on mainstream MS-DOS 6.22 and Borland from those days were incomparable to anything on mainstream Linux even on these days. For some reason Linux is the king of text mode and yet never had a proper TUI tradition. Thank you for sharing the project. Compiled well on my side, looking forward to the next developments. My (u…
Glad it compiled! Most of your suggestions are on my to-do list indeed. I wanted to maintain an animation to demonstrate that it could be kept running throughout all the different dialogs and listboxes. I'll probably end up changing it. Thank you for testing it. :)
Re: Show HN: A retro terminal text editor for GNU/Linux coded in C (C-edit)
#20Love the look, definitely throwing me back to the halcyon QBasic days. Slightly related but another way to simulate a retro text editor (old school raster style green screen aesthetic in this instance) is to combine the "cool-retro-term" terminal with the minimal editor "micro". https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/zyedidia/micro
I love cool-retro-term, I keep it running with a Matrix style terminal toy as a "screensaver" on the small PC sitting on my homelab. It's an ostentatious waste of power and CPU cycles but I appreciate the aesthetics of it.