Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment
(github.com)115 points by kim_rutherford 18 hours ago
115 points by kim_rutherford 18 hours ago
Also reminds me of 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
This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...
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/
Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/
Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X
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
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/7
* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8
However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021.
* 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
And some of the doco seems to have never been incorporated.
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) - 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.
Alas, it's not finished. You've made the mistakes that all of us have made, and haven't caught up with us, must of us having fixed those mistakes, a few years back when implementing 24-bit RGB was in vogue.
This is not, as the function name suggests, a colon, but per ITU/IEC T.416 it should be:
https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...
And not only should this have colons too, but per ITU/IEC T.416 there's a colour space parameter that goes in there:
https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...
The unfortunate part is that when rendering to a terminal, you don't have any available mechanism apart from hand-decoding the family part of the TERM environment variable, and knowing who made which mistakes, to determine which of the 7 possible colour mechanisms are supported. They are:
1. ECMA-48 standard 8 colour, SGRs 30 to 37, 39, 40 to 47, and 49
2. AIXTerm 16 colour, ECMA-48 plus SGRs 90 to 97 and 100 to 107
3. XTerm 256 colour, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;5;n and SGR 48;5;n
4. XTerm 256 colour corrected, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:5:n and SGR 48:5:n
5. 24-bit colour take 1, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;2;r;g;b and SGR 48;2;r;g;b
6. 24-bit colour take 2, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38:2:r:g:b and SGR 48:2:r:g:b
7. 24-bit colour take 3, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:2::r:g:b::: and SGR 48:2::r:g:b:::
Few people support 4, and although quite a lot of us have finally got to supporting 7 it isn't quite universal. Egmont Koblinger, I, and others have been spreading the word where we can over the last few years.
This is where I was at in 2019:
https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TerminalCapa...
There a few updates to that that are going to come out in 1.41, but when it comes to colour they're mainly things like recognizing the "ms-terminal" and "netbsd6" terminal types in the right places.
Reminds me of
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and 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