5 ms·

Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

156 points by kim_rutherford 1y ago

kristopolous 1y ago
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView 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
- skissane 1y ago
  Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day
  - eschaton 1y ago
    This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWindow_Software_Architecture_Rev_1.0_May1992.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...
    - skissane 1y ago
      Also there is a firmware dump for the HP 700/70 which implemented it: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/ https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/ Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/
- jd3 1y ago
  I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating. IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on
    - johng 1y ago
      Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
- boznz 1y ago
  and Borland Turbovision
- ivolimmen 1y ago
  ... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS
- nickdothutton 1y ago
  Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
- icedchai 1y ago
  I was just about to same the same thing! I remember briefly running DESQview on a 386SX, before installing Linux...
matt3210 1y ago
Peak UI for sure!
behnamoh 1y ago
Does it support Liquid Glass? :')
snvzz 1y ago
Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode. I wonder if this was ever resolved.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  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/4 * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7 * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8 However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021. * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30 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 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 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100
  - cosmos0072 1y ago
    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 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.
Lio 1y ago
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.
panzi 1y ago
Wonder if my ansi-img image viewer works in that. Won't compile this from source to test it, but if it's in my Linux distribution I'll do later.
- panzi 1y ago
  Nope, only garbage output: https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh Is there a way to configure another terminal font? But it's not just the font, the terminal seems to also crash. At least it's not responsive anymore and has to be closed.
  - cosmos0072 1y ago
    You can choose the font with `twin --hs=X11,font=X11FONTNAME` or `twin --hw=xft,font=TRUETYPEFONTNAME` I will have a look too, the terminal should not crash or stop being responsive
    - panzi 1y ago
      Thank you. Weird that this isn't in the man page or --help message. Another font didn't fix anything anyway.
      - cosmos0072 1y ago
        I tried compiling https://github.com/panzi/ansi-img https://github.com/panzi/ansi-img and running it inside the truecolor branch of twin, i.e. https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor and it correctly displayed an example JPG I tried - no artefacts, and terminal remained responsive. As I wrote above, I am debugging it and fixing some known issues, thus truecolor support is not yet in the default branch
okflo 1y ago
I remember somewhen in the 90s, having a 386er Linux system with 8MB RAM, experimenting with twin... So cool, that this project is still alive!
Jotalea 1y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to use ANSI escape colors for making gradient window decorations, or simulating transparency on them.

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView 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

skissane 1y ago
Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day
- eschaton 1y ago
  This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWindow_Software_Architecture_Rev_1.0_May1992.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...
  - skissane 1y ago
    Also there is a firmware dump for the HP 700/70 which implemented it: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/ https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/ Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/
jd3 1y ago
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021
- kristopolous 1y ago
  I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating. IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on
  - johng 1y ago
    Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
boznz 1y ago
and Borland Turbovision
ivolimmen 1y ago
... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS
nickdothutton 1y ago
Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
icedchai 1y ago
I was just about to same the same thing! I remember briefly running DESQview on a 386SX, before installing Linux...

matt3210 1y ago

Peak UI for sure!

behnamoh 1y ago

Does it support Liquid Glass? :')

snvzz 1y ago

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

JdeBP 1y ago
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/4 * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7 * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8 However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021. * https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30 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 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 https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100
- cosmos0072 1y ago
  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 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.

Lio 1y ago

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.

panzi 1y ago

Wonder if my ansi-img image viewer works in that. Won't compile this from source to test it, but if it's in my Linux distribution I'll do later.

panzi 1y ago
Nope, only garbage output: https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh Is there a way to configure another terminal font? But it's not just the font, the terminal seems to also crash. At least it's not responsive anymore and has to be closed.
- cosmos0072 1y ago
  You can choose the font with `twin --hs=X11,font=X11FONTNAME` or `twin --hw=xft,font=TRUETYPEFONTNAME` I will have a look too, the terminal should not crash or stop being responsive
  - panzi 1y ago
    Thank you. Weird that this isn't in the man page or --help message. Another font didn't fix anything anyway.
    - cosmos0072 1y ago
      I tried compiling https://github.com/panzi/ansi-img https://github.com/panzi/ansi-img and running it inside the truecolor branch of twin, i.e. https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor and it correctly displayed an example JPG I tried - no artefacts, and terminal remained responsive. As I wrote above, I am debugging it and fixing some known issues, thus truecolor support is not yet in the default branch

okflo 1y ago

I remember somewhen in the 90s, having a 386er Linux system with 8MB RAM, experimenting with twin... So cool, that this project is still alive!

Jotalea 1y ago

I wonder if it would be possible to use ANSI escape colors for making gradient window decorations, or simulating transparency on them.