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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)

#311

Post by internet_points »

pkal wrote: post #67
_2d30 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Magit experience is due to the use of the transient package for its UI. Some other packages also use it. Most notably for my personal usage is the gptel package.

Transient is the worst part about Magit IMO (the best parts are how you can prepare a commit to just include the right changes, or the functionality bound inside the transient menus that make complex operations such as fixups or rebases trivial). Transient UIs are consistently uncomfortable to work with, and could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer. The fact that Transi…

Odd, I can `C-s` just fine in transient buffers. It works exactly like in other buffers.

The `C-h` override is pretty cool there too, e.g. if from magit-status I do `C-h -D` (because I'm wondering what "-D Simplify by decoration" means), then it drops me straight into Man git-log with point at

       --simplify-by-decoration
           Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.
(Ooh, I learnt a new trick from writing a comment, who say social media is a waste of time)

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

#312

Post by GregorBrandt »

disqard wrote: post #228
robenkleene wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes. What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them? I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books. I highly recommend reading this: https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

And a modern implementation can be found here: https://wordtsar.ca

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

#314

Post by burnt-resistor »

SoftTalker wrote: post #205
Lapel2742 wrote: post #53

> “In my house”, we used something called SideKick Plus (1984), which wasn’t really a code editor: it was more of a Personal Information Management (PIM) system with a built-in notepad. Finally! Someone who still remembers the best software ever written. I looooved Sidekick and we used it throughout our small company. It's so long ago. I remember only parts of it now but it was such a useful tool.

The reason IDEs blossomed on DOS was because there was no multitasking. On unix/linux, even on a "dumb" tty with no GUI, you could hit CRTL-Z and your editor would go into the background and you'd be at a shell where you could run make or gdb or manage files. Then type 'fg' and your editor would be back exactly as you left it. IDEs do all that in one huge program because if you exited your editor to run the compiler…

There are multitasking options using DESQview(/X) or Windows >=3.1. A friend of mine in high school ran a 4 line BBS using DESQview and 4 Courier 28.8K modems.

In real mode, it's possible to have a TSR that swaps the entire contents of RAM from disk. As long as such a hypothetical TSR is always loaded into a fixed location, it's possible to save and restore the entire DOS, program, and/or EMS/XMS session.

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

#315

Post by eikenberry »

constantcrying wrote: post #231
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…

[flagged]

TUIs are the best cross platform apps. They run on all the major and minor platforms in general use. GUIs cannot compete with browsers being the next closest thing. They can be integrated with the shell and also work perfectly well remotely w/o issues. TUIs are superior in many ways to GUIs and have a place in the ecosystem.

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

#316

Post by internet_points »

mickeyp wrote: post #25

The knocks against Emacs feel unwarranted. It has plenty of colour; it has mouse support, even in the terminal, but not all terminals support it, so it's optional. It also runs in a GUI with, you know, image support and whatnot. You can rail against its defaults, but do not make misleading claims.

Yeah, the menu bar thing just makes no sense. Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0vFsd3p.png

If you for whatever reason absolutely need to run it in the terminal, then you'll have to either learn that F10 toggles the menu bar, but then it still looks like a real menu bar that you can navigate with the arrows and enter: https://i.imgur.com/ETA2Qhs.png (or you can `M-x xterm-mouse-mode` to use the mouse in the terminal).

(That said, I'm sure the out of the box experience with Borland was quite a bit better back in the day, if you only needed Pascal or C++ support. And emacs really could do with a better default-theme; e.g. simply changing to the built-in modus-vivendi-tinted and it looks like https://i.imgur.com/lRAWzJK.png instead. Doesn't help with the tool-bar icons from 1999 or whatever though)

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

#317

Post by yoz-y »

pjmlp wrote: post #269
yoz-y wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my work is done on remote machines. Nothing beats tmux+tuis in this paradigm.

I rather stick with RDP, or browser based workflows.

They are fine, however RDP requires more bandwidth and most of the stuff I run is terminal commands anyway.

Company I work for has a great browser based IDE but that’s something I would never setup and maintain for a personal project.

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

#318

Post by burnt-resistor »

coldcode wrote: post #12

I used Borland Turbo Pascal in 1984. It was amazing to work with something so fast on a PC that was really so slow. No IDE/Compiler since then matched the speed. Today's code is massively more sophisticated and complex, so there is no way to match that performance today despite the speed of computers today.

Neat. I have an original copy of Numerical Recipes in Pascal.

I used to have a copy of a Turbo Pascal graphics book with a blue-purple Porsche (not pg's hah) on the cover that included code for a raytracer. It would take about a minute to render one line at 320x200x256 colors, depending on the number of scene objects and light sources.

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

#320

Post by eikenberry »

pjmlp wrote: post #252
whartung wrote: post #249

I think these modern TUIs are a testament to the general failure of modern GUIs. It's not like they're particularly easier to write these. But since there's no remote GUI option, much less a portable remote GUI option, particularly one that's not just a video of an entire desktop, we're stuck with these. WHo wants to fire up an entire desktop to get open a simple utility app? Obviously the Web satisfies much of the d…

Failure of Linux Desktop you mean. RDP works great and GUI tooling for Windows and macOS is quite comparable to using VB, Delphi, Smalltalk like experiences.

RDP works great on Linux as well. The problem isn't remote access, it is lack of good cross platform GUIs. There is a reason browsers are dominating the UI space and TUIs are popular.
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