4 ms·

Agreed. I cut my programming teeth on the Dr. Dobbs/Al Stevens "D-flat" series which was a text-based windowing system in C. Some of the most fun I've ever had

by mastry 4y ago

Agreed. I cut my programming teeth on the Dr. Dobbs/Al Stevens "D-flat" series which was a text-based windowing system in C. Some of the most fun I've ever had programming. The hardest part was waiting for the next issue to be published!

ghaerr 4y ago
Funnily enough, I just happened to have ported D-Flat to macOS and Linux in the last couple of weeks. Check it out (w/screenshots): https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat. It uses a small TUI library that maps multi-byte ANSI/xterm arrow key and mouse wheel inputs into unicode private-use codes for internal processing by D-Flat. It also remaps all of the IBM PC code page 437 characters for unicode output, and converts the entire "PC-compatible" screen image including attributes into ANSI terminal output, thanks to some nice code from the Cosmopolitan Project.
- mastry 4y ago
  That is great - I starred the repo. Are the original articles available somewhere?
  - ghaerr 4y ago
    Yes, they're available on the archived Dr Dobbs Journal DVD V6 (https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6 https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6), starting in the May 1991 section, or thereabouts.
pjmlp 4y ago
He eventually ported them into Turbo Pascal as well, that is when I bumped into the series.
password4321 4y ago
I've tried to find the most recent version of that library, even emailing the author, but he's long since moved on and I could only find bits and pieces. Maybe https://archive.org/details/dflat https://archive.org/details/dflat is best now?
- ghaerr 4y ago
  Try https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat https://github.com/ghaerr/dflat, which is D-Flat version 2.0 ported to Linux and macOS.