[mkovach]

Ah, Borland’s IDE! An absolute delight. I’ve yet to find anything modern that matches it. Sure, nostalgia turns everything syrupy, but I actively hunt for excuses to use Free Pascal just to fire up that interface. Okay, fine—I like Pascal too. You caught me.

I also use Sam and Acme from Plan 9 (technically from the excellent plan9port), but let’s be honest: those aren’t IDEs. They’re editors. Tools that let me think instead of wrestle.

There’s a lot we could (and probably should) learn from the old TUIs. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable, even heroic, to spawn a shell from the File menu and run something before returning. Seems people are afraid of losing style points with such grievous actions.

And the keybindings! So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes. They’re burned into my muscle memory so thoroughly that using EMACS feels like trying to type with oven mitts. For years, joe (with the blessed jstar alias) was my editor of choice.

Anyway! Time to boot the Dr. DOS VM, spin the wheel of Advent of Code, and be nostalgically inefficient on purpose.

[bombcar]

One thing about the "professional" DOS software (and you can see it in things like Emacs - eight modes and constantly shifting) was you were basically expected to live in it - it had the full attention of the computer and the user.

You were also expected to learn it; which meant you became "one with the machine" in a way similar to an organ player.

I remember watching Fry's Electronics employees fly through their TUI, so fast that they'd walk away while it was still loading screens, and eventually a printout would come out for the cage.

[Mountain_Skies]

About twenty years ago I did a consulting gig for a government agency that wanted to create a web interface for their CSRs to replace the green screens they had been using. The long time employees hated it because they had deep muscle memory for most tasks on the green screens and could get far ahead of the screen refresh. With the web UI, not only could they not type ahead, but many of the workflows now required use of the mouse.

The agency was happy to have something new and modern but more important to them was that new employees could be trained on the system far faster. Even though there were a small number of long term employees, they had high turnover with the frontline CSRs, which made training a major issue for them.

[Aurornis]

> it had the full attention of the computer and the user.

This why I like to use the full screen mode of my editors and IDEs.

It surprises a lot of people who see my screen. Full screen features are everywhere but rarely used.

[exe34]

Even normal windows applications used to be like this (outside of crashing). I could alt-tab, type stuff and click where I know a button would show before I even saw the application window. It never missed a key stroke or type into the wrong window. Nowadays you load a webpage and start typing, and half you text appears and then the other half just never shows up.

[chiph]

Paying at Best Buy was torture - watching the cashier move their mouse around (on the slanted mousing surface they were given so they couldn't just let go) and click the buttons, going through 3 or 4 screens and waiting for them to load vs. using the keyboard. They would have been done with me and on to the next customer in half the time.

[esafak]

The old TUIs were faster yet I still prefer IntelliJ; it's fast enough and much more powerful.

[robenkleene]

> So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes.

What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them?

I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.

[ninalanyon]

They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.

You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.

[disqard]

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books.

I highly recommend reading this:

https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

[citbl]

What a wonderful write up and I feel the same.

I've been working on my free time on a tui code editor in the same vein eventually with make and lldb built in.

[chuckadams]

There's a lot from Plan 9 I love, but I couldn't find Acme's mouse-dependent UI acceptable in the least. I can't deal with any UI that requires precise aim when I have to use it hour after hour, and I'd hate to imagine using it if I had an actual disability.

[mkovach]

Most days, you’ll find me in sam, regexing my way to bliss like some monastic scribe with a terminal fetish. When I feel the urge to let AI stroke my curiosity or scaffold a long template like magic, I cut, paste, and drop it into a local or remote model like a well-trained familiar.

But I’ve also written larger applications and, frankly, a ridiculous amount of documentation in Acme. That 9P protocol was my backstage pass: every window, every label, was accessible and programmable. I could, for example, hook into a save event and automatically format, lint, and compile ten or fifteen years before most IDEs figured out how to fake that kind of integration.

Sure, the system demands precision. It doesn't coddle. But for me, that was the feature, not the bug. The rigor sharpened my thinking. It taught me to be exact or be silent, forcing me to pause when I usually would not.

[skopje]

djgpp + vi for dos in 1991 ftw!

[rahen]

Did you really use vi on DOS in 1991? I don’t remember Elvis being easy to find back then, and I don’t think it was a TSR either, so the compiler couldn’t be spawned in the background like it was with the Borland IDEs.

Almost every C bedroom programmer I knew had a cracked copy of Turbo C / Turbo C++ because they were so modern and convenient. DJGPP was a nightmare in comparison, it filled up the small HDDs of the time, created large executables, and the process of opening edit.com, leaving the editor, running gcc, and then going back to edit.com was tedious.

The few brave souls using DJGPP would usually end up running Slackware from around 1993. This was a step up from bolting an awkward POSIX runtime onto a monotasking system, as DJGPP did on DOS.

DJGPP was a stellar idea, basically the WSL / MinGW of the days, but the limitations of DOS prevented it to shine compared to the Borland IDEs.