4 ms·

Oh yeah. I'm going to date myself here, but I was just going to say this reminds me a lot of Borland Turbo C++ way back in the day. They had this thing called

Oh yeah. I'm going to date myself here, but I was just going to say this reminds me a lot of Borland Turbo C++ way back in the day. They had this thing called Turbo Vision for building text UIs. It seemed super cool back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

dewlinedew 6y ago
It had been open sourced i made a project using it: https://github.com/ivans5/BitMediaCentre https://github.com/ivans5/BitMediaCentre
Phil-bitplex 6y ago
It was super cool!!! I had so much fun emulating it drawing single and double line text borders, with shadows. Oh ASCII chart how I miss thee.
Minor49er 6y ago
It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!
- makapuf 6y ago
  Hypertext integrated help has been available earlier than turbo vision even. It has been available from turbo pascal 3 at least. For a young like me who ... copied it on two disks, it was awesome what you could learn.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Turbo Pascal 3 didn't have integrated help (hypertext or not), it was introduced in Turbo Pascal 4 (which itself was AFAIK in general a big rewrite of the compiler and IDE). Though the integrated help really improved with version 6 (when Turbo Vision was also introduced) since you could move a cursor freely inside the help window as if it was an editor, select and copy text, the help text was much more detailed and more organized and every function/procedure also had a small example showing its use (version 5.5 also had examples but the overall help was much more terse).
    - makapuf 6y ago
      Ah, maybe version 4. 5.5 was my favourite with objects. Later ones with turbo vision swapped on my 640k 8086.

dewlinedew 6y ago

It had been open sourced i made a project using it: https://github.com/ivans5/BitMediaCentre https://github.com/ivans5/BitMediaCentre

Phil-bitplex 6y ago

It was super cool!!! I had so much fun emulating it drawing single and double line text borders, with shadows. Oh ASCII chart how I miss thee.

Minor49er 6y ago

It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!

makapuf 6y ago
Hypertext integrated help has been available earlier than turbo vision even. It has been available from turbo pascal 3 at least. For a young like me who ... copied it on two disks, it was awesome what you could learn.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Turbo Pascal 3 didn't have integrated help (hypertext or not), it was introduced in Turbo Pascal 4 (which itself was AFAIK in general a big rewrite of the compiler and IDE). Though the integrated help really improved with version 6 (when Turbo Vision was also introduced) since you could move a cursor freely inside the help window as if it was an editor, select and copy text, the help text was much more detailed and more organized and every function/procedure also had a small example showing its use (version 5.5 also had examples but the overall help was much more terse).
  - makapuf 6y ago
    Ah, maybe version 4. 5.5 was my favourite with objects. Later ones with turbo vision swapped on my 640k 8086.