Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface (TUI) framework developed around 1990 by Borland for Pascal and C++. Later it was deprecated in favor of Object Windows Library for the then-increasingly important Win16 API.

For the TV tuner, see TurboVision.
Turbo Vision
Developer(s)Borland
Initial release1990 (1990)
Written in
Operating systemMS-DOS
PlatformPC
TypeWidget toolkit
LicensePublic domain software[1][2]
Websitetvision.sf.net
Turbo Vision based IDE for Turbo C++

The Turbo Vision framework was included with Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Borland C++. It was used by Borland itself to write the integrated development environments (IDE) for these programming languages. By default, Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs. Key parts of the Turbo Vision library replicate the functionality of standard components in Microsoft Windows, for example edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.

Around 1997, the C++ version, including source code, was released by Borland into the public domain[1][2] and is currently being ported and developed by an open-source community on sourceforge under the GPL license.[3] An older update of the Borland code by Sergio Sigala is available under the BSD license.

The Pascal version, which was distributed alongside Borland Pascal 7 on a "bonus" disk, was never released under a free software license, so the Free Pascal project recreated its own version by backporting a clone made by Leon de Boer that ran in graphical mode back to textmode. The result is called Free Vision.[4] Over the years this codebase has grown stable on nearly all operating systems and architectures that FPC supports. The textmode IDE is very close to the original TP environment, with built-in compiler and IDE much closer than e.g. RHIDE, and supporting functionality like code folding.

Unicode support

One of the factors limiting Turbo Vision popularity was the absence of unicode support in original Borland's version. Currently there is a fork of C++ version of the framework supporting UTF-8.[5] The same solution for Free Pascal implementation, Free Vision, is discussed.[6]

See also

References
  1. Tvision "What about copyrights? [...] According to a FAQ entry in the Borland's site (was in http://www.inprise.com/devsupport/bcppbuilder/faq/QNA906.html%5B%5D when I saw it) the code is public domain. I also asked in the Borland's newsgroup and the TeamB people (not official people but they are who give technical support in the net) said me the FAQ was right."
  2. Turbo Vision - by Borland Developer Support Staff on community.borland.com/ "Question: Where can I find the public domain version of Turbo Vision? Answer: It can be found at ftp.inprise.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/archive/turbovision/" (1998, archived)
  3. tvision.sf.net on sf.net
  4. Free Vision on freepascal.org
  5. https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
  6. https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=21373
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.