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Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

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Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#11

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

... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#14

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

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

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#15
post #13

Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode. I wonder if this was ever resolved.

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

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#16
post #15
post #13

Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode. I wonder if this was ever resolved.

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. * http…

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.

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#17
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.

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. * http…

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 (n…

Do symbols for legacy computing work with it? Especially the 1/8ths vertical/horizontal blocks?

Re: Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

#20

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

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