gerhobbelt / tvision-css

Turbo Vision for the 21st century!

Turbo Vision for the 21st century

What is Turbo Vision?

Turbo Vision is a text-based user interface framework introduced back in the nineties by Borland, and is most known as the user interface of Turbo Pascal IDE as well as and Turbo C. Some applications such as Dos Navigator have been created using this framework, and later on it was adopted by Free Pascal and there are some implementations of the framework still living now days.

The user interface was quite intuitive, and was quite handy when graphical user interfaces were less common than nowadays, and applications had to reinvent the user interface on their own with no agreed guidelines on how user interfaces should look and behave. Later on, when graphical environments and windowing systems became common, old, text-based user interface came to extinction, and currently there are no robust applications that invest in text-based user interfaces as pretty as those of the nineties. Today UIs are graphical, and there is no place for old and limited user interfaces, unless you count the people who still remember these early days of user interfaces and find it pretty and retro.

Reimplementing Turbo Vision

This projects aims to recreate the look and feel of Turbo Vision using modern technologies. The implementation isn't supposed to be one-to-one implementation, but make it feel familiar. Nowadays we are not limited to 16 colors any more, we can use different fonts and font sizes, and real opacity can be created for shadows. We try to keep it as familiar as possible but still create semantic HTML without unnecessary elements.