The wrapper gives a higher level API, and solves some of the things like the rather antique palette API (or wraps it), is adding layout, etc.
```
var lMenuBar := new MenuBar;
lMenuBar
.Add(lDocumentMenu)
.Add(lViewMenu)
.Add(lDialogsMenu)
.Add(new Menu('~A~pp').AddItem('E~x~it', Commands.Quit));
fApplication.SetMenuBar(lMenuBar);
(This is Oxygene, currently compiling to .Net. Can be used from any .Net language of course, even Go or Swift with our toolchain, but as an assembly, consumed by anything. Using PInvoke for the native TV binaries.)
Heavily in progress :D The repo is still private and I'm working on things like basing palettes on the surfaces controls are placed on today and tomorrow. Todos are cleaning up layouts, adding a few more basic (for today) missing controls, etc.
I had experimented with libraries like Terminal.GUI, which was (still is?) in the middle of a v2 transition and really difficult to get behaving without bugs. And Claude is a great lesson about TUIs and libraries that have been built without real terminal consideration -- lots of what not to do. I found myself missing Turbo Vision and thinking, why not just have a modern version? Then I found this repo, saw it was updated for Unicode, etc... I am very grateful to the author.
For those who aren't familiar[1], it's part of RemObjects' Elements[2] suite, which allows you to use and mix several different popular languages in addition to the Pascal-based Oxygene across Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android etc.
Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.
This is a cultural treasure.
Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3
It was either the manuals, or getting lucky with magazine articles or local library book selection.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
few quick notes:
- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.
- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.
- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.
- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy
- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement
- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)
overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.
Not sure what you mean here. Turbo Vision came with extensive high quality documentation. If anything such documentation is what's lacking nowadays.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandTurrogrammingGu...
if you work with qt for example so these days you ask google/stackoverflow/qtforum and you have multitude of responses if it's a common problem and sometimes you have whole solutions ready to copy&paste.
when you work with TV and ask google - you usually get... not much. so you have to take the longer route: study the doc/books (you mentioned), study the code, examples... or be friend with the author of this library or those two or three people who actively use this library these days ;)
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
History rumor hill goes that originally MFC was just as high level, the origin of Afx prefix, however internal teams were opposed to it and hence how MFC became a very thin layer over Win32.
History repeated itself with C++/CX, finally Microsoft had something comparable to C++ Builder, and internal teams weren't happy until they sabotaged the whole effort with C++/WinRT. Now outside Windows team no one cares.
The development experience with OWL, on Windows 3.1 was great, I never bothered with raw Win16 or Win32 other that learning the foundations, or adding support for missing capabilities, at the TP, Delphi, C++ frameworks.
There's also this one in C++: https://github.com/kloczek/tvision
The one that comes with FreePascal/Lazarus is written in Pascal.
There's even one in Rust, though it might have been vibe-coded: https://github.com/aovestdipaperino/turbo-vision-4-rust
It does showcase our incompetence. In this age we should be able to point to some online compiler and run it. Or download it and run it on a folder. That should be the extent of our involvement with tools. But apparently they are not tools, but rituals we insist on.
autotools is horrifying. I'm not claiming that there is an obviously better way to solve the problem that it tries to solve, but it is horrifying.
FTR, I have much more experience with cmake, which is also horrifying. (Maybe there is no non-horrifying way to solve this problem?)
Anyone tested to run this on a high resolution Linux text mode with GPM?
I still need a VT-230 or 330.