Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision is a text-based user interface (TUI) framework originally developed by Borland for DOS. It provides a C++ object-oriented interface for building TUIs and includes widgets like windows, buttons, menus, and text boxes.
Turbo Vision image
textbased tui borland dos c objectoriented

Turbo Vision: Text-Based UI Framework for DOS

A C++ based TUI framework developed by Borland for building text-based user interfaces, featuring windows, buttons, menus, and text boxes.

What is Turbo Vision?

Turbo Vision is an object-oriented framework for building text-based user interfaces (TUIs). It was originally developed in the early 1990s by Borland for use in DOS applications.

Some key features of Turbo Vision include:

  • A library of widgets like windows, buttons, menus, text boxes, checkboxes, etc. to aid in TUI construction
  • Virtual screening allowing applications to have multiple overlapping windows
  • Mouse support in text mode through the use of character graphics
  • Event-driven programming model for building interactive TUIs
  • Object-oriented design implemented in C++ for modularity and code reuse

Although developed many years ago, Turbo Vision allows developers to build sophisticated text-based interfaces with advanced features like mouse support. It represents an important evolution in TUI frameworks. While it is not as widely used today due to the predominance of graphical user interfaces, Turbo Vision is still used in some software to provide an efficient, high-performance interface optimized for text terminals.

Turbo Vision Features

Features

  1. Object-oriented framework for building text-based user interfaces
  2. Includes widgets like windows, buttons, menus, text boxes
  3. Event-driven architecture
  4. Virtual screen support
  5. Mouse support
  6. Theme support for customizing look and feel

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Lightweight and fast

Very customizable

Good for systems with limited resources

Does not require a graphical environment

Portable across platforms

Cons

Text-based interface is less intuitive than GUI

Limited built-in widget set

Steep learning curve

Not actively maintained anymore

Lacks some modern UI features


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