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IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

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Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#141

Post by skydhash »

layer8 wrote: post #119
skydhash wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base input of emacs is ‘M-x’. From there, any command is accessible. And you have ‘M-:’ for evaluating any bit of elisp code. There’s a few UI concepts to learn (frame, window, buffers, point, mark, region,…), but that would fit in a single sheet of paper.

The keys I enumerated are sufficient to discover and execute all available operations in that style of TUI. You don’t have to type commands or command-specific keyboard shortcuts, like you have to in Emacs. It’s analogous to how in a traditional GUI you can discover and execute everything just using the mouse. Like in the GUI analogy, you can then choose to remember and use the displayed keyboard shortcuts for freque…

It’s easy when you have a small amount of commands. And distributions like Doom Emacs is fairly discoverable too. But emacs have a lot of commands and while it offers menus, it’s only the surface level of what’s available.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#142

Post by a3w »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #125

(Article is from 2023, so the title should be updated to say "32 years ago", or something) The biggest loss in TUIs is the latest wave of asynchronous frameworks, which bring the joy of dropped keypresses to the terminal. In any TUI released before the year 2000, if you press a key when the system wasn't ready, the key would just wait until the system was ready. Many TUIs today still do this, but increasingly frequen…

Rough quote: "in 1984 we had at my house",

so even 41 years seems to be in the scope.

I was expecting

- early projects that ended in Visual Studio 1.0 or NetBeans soon after, (2 to 9 years too early for them)

not

- "vim (1991) was not out yet" (not-a-quote, but my feeiling upon looking at ncurses instead of floating windows)

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#143

Post by Sophira »

The article itself is a nice look at the state of editors and IDEs compared to those of yesteryear... but the site itself restyles my scroll bar to be thinner and less usable, which kind of spoils the experience.

I hate it when sites do this. I don't want my window decorations to be restyled in the name of aesthetics. I need them to be usable.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#144

Post by bigstrat2003 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #65

Good article. I'm more of a GUI guy who is contend with VSCode. I'm intrigued to learn Emacs but don't have the time for it. Back in the 90s, however, Borland TUI was indeed the pinnacle. I remember I played with Turbo C for a while but did not learn anything, but it was fun just to use the IDE.

I think that GUI editors are just plain superior for doing serious work. I'm a Sublime guy myself, but really any GUI editor blows any text based option out of the water. The only good use case for text based editors these days is to quickly edit and save config files while ssh'ed into a server.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#145

Post by ivanjermakov »

afc wrote: post #112

For what it's worth it, I'm still developing and using exclusively my own text-based editor/IDE: https://github.com/alefore/edge I wrote recently a bit about my conclusions after ten years of developing it: https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/edge/README.md

Me too. It took ~4 months of development, but was fun.

https://github.com/ivanjermakov/hat

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#147

Post by anarticle »

"the IDE had to be discoverable right away (which it was) and self-contained to offer you a complete development experience"

This right here was the key to super flow state. Lightning fast help (F1), very terse and straightforward manuals. I have tried to replicate this with things like Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), to some degree of success.

The closest thing I had to this in windows was probably Visual Studio 6 before the MSDN added everything that wasn't C/C++ to the help docs. After that, the docs got much harder to use due to their not being single purpose anymore. The IDE was a little more complex, but you at least felt like you got something for it. After that, too many languages, too many features, overall not great experience.

The keybindings were so simple and fast, Borland IDE on DOS was a very nice tool. Yes, easier than vim and emacs. The reason is because of mouse in TUI so things like complex selection/blocks/text manipulation are not keybindings in the same way so the key combos are more "programming meta"(build, debug, etc) rather than "text meta".

EDIT: also, I feel like this needs to be mentioned: compilers were not free (as in beer) at that time!

In order to develop on my own machine as a teen, I had to sneakily copy the floppy disks the teacher used to install this on the school computers so I could have more than 1h using it at home! COPY THAT FLOPPY

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#148

Post by karmakaze »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #125

(Article is from 2023, so the title should be updated to say "32 years ago", or something) The biggest loss in TUIs is the latest wave of asynchronous frameworks, which bring the joy of dropped keypresses to the terminal. In any TUI released before the year 2000, if you press a key when the system wasn't ready, the key would just wait until the system was ready. Many TUIs today still do this, but increasingly frequen…

I wasn't paying attention to when 30 years ago actually was...

So disappointing to expect a GUI Smalltalk System Browser and seeing DOS TUIs.

And then delight recalling Turbo C/Pascal and MS C 4.0 with CodeView that even worked in 43 or 50 line modes.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#149

Post by nobleach »

andsoitis wrote: post #102
dardeaup wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi is still very impressive. However, they missed out on a much greater opportunity. Part of Delphi's crown jewels is VCL which can only be used on Windows. If you use Delphi for an OS other than Windows you have to use FireMonkey/FMX. Lazarus has LCL which is VERY similar to VCL, but LCL on Lazarus is not limited to Windows. One can write a LCL application and it works the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If D…

Don’t disagree that VCL across all the platforms would be a game changer. However, the quality and reliability of the Delphi experience together with mobile support overcome the VCL/FMX trade off in my books.

I had high hopes for Kylix back around the turn of the millennium. At that time my company was looking moving an organization with field agents to a full Linux-based system. Our options were: 1. Keep the existing CA Clipper accounts receivable/accounts payable apps and run on emulated DOS. 2. Attempt to leverage the Harbour language (CA Clipper compatible web based thing). 3. Rewrite the system in Delphi/Kylix. We actually got fairly far with Kylix and I'll always be a fan of Delphi. In the end a pure web-based rewrite won over all those original options. I feel bad for whomever took over that old PHP4 stuff!

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#150

Post by tstenner »

realharo wrote: post #40
pragmatic wrote: post #33

TUIs sucked and they still suck. Programmers are trying to bring them back bc nostalgia I guess? I floated the idea of TUIs to our data engineering team and got very negative responses. (My nostalgia for undergrad turbo pascal TUI I guess lol)

I think TUIs mostly suck for IDEs, but some tools like k9s or htop are nice.

Even k9s would profit enormously from detachable dialogs. Just let me do something without losing my current log view.
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