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Turbo Vision

A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0, the classical framework for text-based user interfaces. Now cross-platform and with Unicode support.

tvedit in Konsole

I started this as a personal project at the very end of 2018. By May 2020 I considered it was very close to feature parity with the original, and decided to make it open.

The original goals of this project were:

At one point I considered I had done enough, and that any attempts at revamping the library and overcoming its original limitations would require either extending the API or breaking backward compatibility, and that a major rewrite would be most likely necessary.

However, between July and August 2020 I found the way to integrate full-fledged Unicode support into the existing architecture, wrote the Turbo text editor and also made the new features available on Windows. So I am confident that Turbo Vision can now meet many of the expectations of modern users and programmers.

The original location of this project is https://github.com/magiblot/tvision.

Table of contents

<div id="what-for"></div>

What is Turbo Vision good for?

A lot has changed since Borland created Turbo Vision in the early 90's. Many GUI tools today separate appearance specification from behaviour specification, use safer or dynamic languages which do not segfault on error, and support either parallel or asynchronous programming, or both.

Turbo Vision does not excel at any of those, but it certainly overcomes many of the issues programmers still face today when writing terminal applications:

  1. Forget about terminal capabilities and direct terminal I/O. When writing a Turbo Vision application, all you have to care about is what you want your application to behave and look like—there is no need to add workarounds in your code. Turbo Vision tries its best to produce the same results on all environments. For example: in order to get a bright background color on the Linux console, the blink attribute has to be set. Turbo Vision does this for you.

  2. Reuse what has already been done. Turbo Vision provides many widget classes (also known as views), including resizable, overlapping windows, pull-down menus, dialog boxes, buttons, scroll bars, input boxes, check boxes and radio buttons. You may use and extend these; but even if you prefer creating your own, Turbo Vision already handles event dispatching, display of fullwidth Unicode characters, etc.: you do not need to waste time rewriting any of that.

  3. Can you imagine writing a text-based interface that works both on Linux and Windows (and thus is cross-platform) out-of-the-box, with no #ifdefs? Turbo Vision makes this possible. First: Turbo Vision keeps on using char arrays instead of relying on the implementation-defined and platform-dependent wchar_t or TCHAR. Second: thanks to UTF-8 support in setlocale in recent versions of Microsoft's RTL, code like the following will work as intended:

    std::ifstream f("コンピュータ.txt"); // On Windows, the RTL converts this to the system encoding on-the-fly.
<div id="how-to"></div>

How do I use Turbo Vision?

You can get started with the Turbo Vision For C++ User's Guide, and look at the sample applications hello, tvdemo and tvedit. Once you grasp the basics, I suggest you take a look at the Turbo Vision 2.0 Programming Guide, which is, in my opinion, more intuitive and easier to understand, despite using Pascal. By then you will probably be interested in the palette example, which contains a detailed description of how palettes are used.

Don't forget to check out the <a href="#features">features</a> and <a href="#apichanges">API changes</a> sections as well.

<div id="downloads"></div>

Releases and downloads

This project has no stable releases for the time being. If you are a developer, try to stick to the latest commit and report any issues you find while upgrading.

If you just want to test the demo applications:

Build environment

<div id="build-linux"></div>

Linux

Turbo Vision can be built as an static library with CMake and GCC/Clang.

cmake . -B ./build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && # Could also be 'Debug', 'MinSizeRel' or 'RelWithDebInfo'.
cmake --build ./build # or `cd ./build; make`

CMake versions older than 3.13 may not support the -B option. You can try the following instead:

mkdir -p build; cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release &&
cmake --build .

The above produces the following files:

The library and executables can be found in ./build.

The build requirements are:

If your distribution provides separate devel packages (e.g. libncurses-dev, libgpm-dev in Debian-based distros), install these too.

<div id="build-linux-runtime"></div>

The runtime requirements are:

The minimal command line required to build a Turbo Vision application (e.g. hello.cpp with GCC) from this project's root is:

g++ -std=c++14 -o hello hello.cpp ./build/libtvision.a -Iinclude -lncursesw -lgpm

You may also need:

-lgpm is only necessary if Turbo Vision was built with libgpm support.

The backward-compatibility headers in include/tvision/compat/borland emulate the Borland C++ RTL. Turbo Vision's source code still depends on them, and they could be useful if porting old applications. This also means that including tvision/tv.h will bring several std names to the global namespace.

<div id="build-msvc"></div>

Windows (MSVC)

The build process with MSVC is slightly more complex, as there are more options to choose from. Note that you will need different build directories for different target architectures. For instance, to generate optimized binaries:

cmake . -B ./build && # Add '-A x64' (64-bit) or '-A Win32' (32-bit) to override the default platform.
cmake --build ./build --config Release # Could also be 'Debug', 'MinSizeRel' or 'RelWithDebInfo'.

In the example above, tvision.lib and the example applications will be placed at ./build/Release.

If you wish to link Turbo Vision statically against Microsoft's run-time library (/MT instead of /MD), enable the TV_USE_STATIC_RTL option (-DTV_USE_STATIC_RTL=ON when calling cmake).

If you wish to link an application against Turbo Vision, note that MSVC won't allow you to mix /MT with /MD or debug with non-debug binaries. All components have to be linked against the RTL in the same way.

If you develop your own Turbo Vision application make sure to enable the following compiler flags, or else you will get compilation errors when including <tvision/tv.h>:

/permissive-
/Zc:__cplusplus

If you use Turbo Vision as a CMake submodule, these flags will be enabled automatically.

Note: Turbo Vision uses setlocale to set the RTL functions in UTF-8 mode. This won't work if you use an old version of the RTL.

With the RTL statically linked in, and if UTF-8 is supported in setlocale, Turbo Vision applications are portable and work by default on Windows Vista and later.

<div id="build-mingw"></div>

Windows (MinGW)

Once your MinGW environment is properly set up, build is done in a similar way to Linux:

cmake . -B ./build -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release &&
cmake --build ./build

In the example above, libtvision.a and all examples are in ./build if TV_BUILD_EXAMPLES option is ON (the default).

If you wish to link an application against Turbo Vision, simply add -L./build/lib -ltvision to your linker and -I./include to your compiler

<div id="build-borland"></div>

Windows/DOS (Borland C++)

Turbo Vision can still be built either as a DOS or Windows library with Borland C++. Obviously, there is no Unicode support here.

I can confirm the build process works with:

You may face different problems depending on your build environment. For instance, Turbo Assembler needs a patch to work under Windows 95. On Windows XP everything seems to work fine. On Windows 10, MAKE may emit the error Fatal: Command arguments too long, which can be fixed by upgrading MAKE to the one bundled with Borland C++ 5.x.

Yes, this works on 64-bit Windows 10. What won't work is the Borland C++ installer, which is a 16-bit application. You will have to run it on another environment or try your luck with winevdm.

A Borland Makefile can be found in the project directory. Build can be done by doing:

cd project
make.exe <options>

Where <options> can be:

This will compile the library into a LIB directory next to project, and will compile executables for the demo applications in their respective examples/* directories.

I'm sorry, the root makefile assumes it is executed from the project directory. You can still run the original makefiles directly (in source/tvision and examples/*) if you want to use different settings.

<div id="build-vcpkg"></div>

Vcpkg

Turbo Vision can be built and installed using the vcpkg dependency manager:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
./vcpkg integrate install
./vcpkg install tvision

The tvision port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If you find it to be out of date, please create an issue or pull request in the vcpkg repository.

<div id="build-cmake"></div>

Turbo Vision as a CMake dependency (not Borland C++)

If you choose the CMake build system for your application, there are two main ways to link against Turbo Vision:

In either case, <tvision/tv.h> will be available in your application's include path during compilation, and your application will be linked against the necessary libraries (Ncurses, GPM...) automatically.

<div id="features"></div>

Features

Modern platforms (not Borland C++)

There are a few environment variables that affect the behaviour of all Turbo Vision applications:

Unix

The following environment variables are also taken into account:

Windows

The following are not available when compiling with Borland C++:

Note: Turbo Vision writes UTF-8 text directly to the Windows console. If the console is set in legacy mode and the bitmap font is being used, Unicode characters will not be displayed properly (photo). To avoid this, Turbo Vision detects this situation and tries to change the console font to Consolas or Lucida Console.

All platforms

The following are new features not available in Borland's release of Turbo Vision or in previous open source ports (Sigala, SET):

<div id="apichanges"></div>

API changes

Screenshots

You will find some screenshots here. Feel free to add your own!

Contributing

If you know of any Turbo Vision applications whose source code has not been lost and that could benefit from this, let me know.

<div id="applications"></div>

Applications using Turbo Vision

If your application is based on this project and you'd like it to appear in the following list, just let me know.

<div id="unicode"></div>

Unicode support

The Turbo Vision API has been extended to allow receiving Unicode input and displaying Unicode text. The supported encoding is UTF-8, for a number of reasons:

Note that when built with Borland C++, Turbo Vision does not support Unicode. However, this does not affect the way Turbo Vision applications are written, since the API extensions are designed to allow for encoding-agnostic code.

Reading Unicode input

The traditional way to get text from a key press event is as follows:

// 'ev' is a TEvent, and 'ev.what' equals 'evKeyDown'.
switch (ev.keyDown.keyCode) {
    // Key shortcuts are usually checked first.
    // ...
    default: {
        // The character is encoded in the current codepage
        // (CP437 by default).
        char c = ev.keyDown.charScan.charCode;
        // ...
    }
}

Some of the existing Turbo Vision classes that deal with text input still depend on this methodology, which has not changed. Single-byte characters, when representable in the current codepage, continue to be available in ev.keyDown.charScan.charCode.

Unicode support consists in two new fields in ev.keyDown (which is a struct KeyDownEvent):

Note that the text string is not null-terminated. You can get a TStringView out of a KeyDownEvent with the getText() method.

So a Unicode character can be retrieved from TEvent in the following way:

switch (ev.keyDown.keyCode) {
    // ...
    default: {
        std::string_view sv = ev.keyDown.getText();
        processText(sv);
    }
}

Let's see it from another perspective. If the user types ñ, a TEvent is generated with the following keyDown struct:

KeyDownEvent {
    union {
        .keyCode = 0xA4,
        .charScan = CharScanType {
            .charCode = 164 ('ñ'), // In CP437
            .scanCode = 0
        }
    },
    .controlKeyState = 0x200 (kbInsState),
    .text = {'\xC3', '\xB1'}, // In UTF-8
    .textLength = 2
}

However, if they type € the following will happen:

KeyDownEvent {
    union {
        .keyCode = 0x0 (kbNoKey), // '€' not part of CP437
        .charScan = CharScanType {
            .charCode = 0,
            .scanCode = 0
        }
    },
    .controlKeyState = 0x200 (kbInsState),
    .text = {'\xE2', '\x82', '\xAC'}, // In UTF-8
    .textLength = 3
}

If a key shortcut is pressed instead, text is empty:

KeyDownEvent {
    union {
        .keyCode = 0xB (kbCtrlK),
        .charScan = CharScanType {
            .charCode = 11 ('♂'),
            .scanCode = 0
        }
    },
    .controlKeyState = 0x20C (kbCtrlShift | kbInsState),
    .text = {},
    .textLength = 0
}

So, in short: views designed without Unicode input in mind will continue to work exactly as they did before, and views which want to be Unicode-aware will have no issues in being so.

Displaying Unicode text

The original design of Turbo Vision uses 16 bits to represent a screen cell—8 bit for a character and 8 bit for BIOS color attributes.

A new TScreenCell type is defined in <tvision/scrncell.h> which is capable of holding a limited number of UTF-8 codepoints in addition to extended attributes (bold, underline, italic...). However, you should not write text into a TScreenCell directly but make use of Unicode-aware API functions instead.

Text display rules

A character provided as argument to any of the Turbo Vision API functions that deal with displaying text is interpreted as follows:

For example, the string "╔[\xFE]╗" may be displayed as ╔[■]╗. This means that box-drawing characters can be mixed with UTF-8 in general, which is useful for backward compatibility. If you rely on this behaviour, though, you may get unexpected results: for instance, "\xC4\xBF" is a valid UTF-8 sequence and is displayed as Ŀ instead of ─┐.

One of the issues of Unicode support is the existence of multi-width characters and combining characters. This conflicts with Turbo Vision's original assumption that the screen is a grid of cells occupied by a single character each. Nevertheless, these cases are handled in the following way:

Here is an example of such characters in the Turbo text editor: Wide character display

Unicode-aware API functions

The usual way of writing to the screen is by using TDrawBuffer. A few methods have been added and others have changed their meaning:

void TDrawBuffer::moveChar(ushort indent, char c, TColorAttr attr, ushort count);
void TDrawBuffer::putChar(ushort indent, char c);

c is always interpreted as a character in the active codepage.

ushort TDrawBuffer::moveStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TColorAttr attr);
ushort TDrawBuffer::moveCStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TAttrPair attrs);

str is interpreted according to the rules exposed previously.

ushort TDrawBuffer::moveStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TColorAttr attr, ushort maxWidth, ushort strIndent = 0); // New
ushort TDrawBuffer::moveCStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TColorAttr attr, ushort maxWidth, ushort strIndent = 0); // New

str is interpreted according to the rules exposed previously, but:

The return values are the number of display columns that were actually filled with text.

void TDrawBuffer::moveBuf(ushort indent, const void *source, TColorAttr attr, ushort count);

The name of this function is misleading. Even in its original implementation, source is treated as a string. So it is equivalent to moveStr(indent, TStringView((const char*) source, count), attr).

There are other useful Unicode-aware functions:

int cstrlen(TStringView s);

Returns the displayed length of s according to the aforementioned rules, discarding ~ characters.

int strwidth(TStringView s); // New

Returns the displayed length of s.

On Borland C++, these methods assume a single-byte encoding and all characters being one column wide. This makes it possible to write encoding-agnostic draw() and handleEvent() methods that work on both platforms without a single #ifdef.

The functions above are implemented using the functions from the TText namespace, another API extension. You will have to use them directly if you want to fill TScreenCell objects with text manually. To give an example, below are some of the TText functions. You can find all of them with complete descriptions in <tvision/ttext.h>.

size_t TText::next(TStringView text);
size_t TText::prev(TStringView text, size_t index);
void TText::drawChar(TSpan<TScreenCell> cells, char c);
size_t TText::drawStr(TSpan<TScreenCell> cells, size_t indent, TStringView text, int textIndent);
bool TText::drawOne(TSpan<TScreenCell> cells, size_t &i, TStringView text, size_t &j);

For drawing TScreenCell buffers into a view, the following methods are available:

void TView::writeBuf(short x, short y, short w, short h, const TScreenCell *b); // New
void TView::writeLine(short x, short y, short w, short h, const TScreenCell *b); // New

Example: Unicode text in menus and status bars

It's as simple as it can be. Let's modify hello.cpp as follows:

TMenuBar *THelloApp::initMenuBar( TRect r )
{
    r.b.y = r.a.y+1;
    return new TMenuBar( r,
      *new TSubMenu( "~Ñ~ello", kbAltH ) +
        *new TMenuItem( "階~毎~料入報最...", GreetThemCmd, kbAltG ) +
        *new TMenuItem( "五劫~の~擦り切れ", cmYes, kbNoKey, hcNoContext ) +
        *new TMenuItem( "העברית ~א~ינטרנט", cmNo, kbNoKey, hcNoContext ) +
         newLine() +
        *new TMenuItem( "E~x~it", cmQuit, cmQuit, hcNoContext, "Alt-X" )
        );
}

TStatusLine *THelloApp::initStatusLine( TRect r )
{
    r.a.y = r.b.y-1;
    return new TStatusLine( r,
        *new TStatusDef( 0, 0xFFFF ) +
            *new TStatusItem( "~Alt-Ç~ Exit", kbAltX, cmQuit ) +
            *new TStatusItem( 0, kbF10, cmMenu )
            );
}

Here is what it looks like:

Unicode Hello

Example: writing Unicode-aware draw() methods

The following is an excerpt from an old implementation of TFileViewer::draw() (part of the tvdemo application), which does not draw Unicode text properly:

if (delta.y + i < fileLines->getCount()) {
    char s[maxLineLength+1];
    p = (char *)(fileLines->at(delta.y+i));
    if (p == 0 || strlen(p) < delta.x)
        s[0] = EOS;
    else
        strnzcpy(s, p+delta.x, maxLineLength+1);
    b.moveStr(0, s, c);
}
writeBuf( 0, i, size.x, 1, b );

All it does is move part of a string in fileLines into b, which is a TDrawBuffer. delta is a TPoint representing the scroll offset in the text view, and i is the index of the visible line being processed. c is the text color. A few issues are present:

Below is a corrected version of the code above that handles Unicode properly:

if (delta.y + i < fileLines->getCount()) {
    p = (char *)(fileLines->at(delta.y+i));
    if (p)
        b.moveStr(0, p, c, size.x, delta.x);
}
writeBuf( 0, i, size.x, 1, b );

The overload of moveStr used here is TDrawBuffer::moveStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TColorAttr attr, ushort width, ushort begin). This function not only provides Unicode support, but also helps us write cleaner code and overcome some of the limitations previously present:

Unicode support across standard views

Support for creating Unicode-aware views is in place, and most views in the original Turbo Vision library have been adapted to handle Unicode.

The following views can display Unicode text properly. Some of them also do horizontal scrolling or word wrapping; all of that should work fine.

The following views can, in addition, process Unicode text or user input:

Views not in this list may not have needed any corrections or I simply forgot to fix them. Please submit an issue if you notice anything not working as expected.

Use cases where Unicode is not supported (not an exhaustive list):

<div id="clipboard"></div>

Clipboard interaction

Originally, Turbo Vision offered no integration with the system clipboard, since there was no such thing on MS-DOS.

It did offer the possibility of using an instance of TEditor as an internal clipboard, via the TEditor::clipboard static member. However, TEditor was the only class able to interact with this clipboard. It was not possible to use it with TInputLine, for example.

Turbo Vision applications are now most likely to be ran in a graphical environment through a terminal emulator. In this context, it would be desirable to interact with the system clipboard in the same way as a regular GUI application would do.

To deal with this, a new class TClipboard has been added which allows accessing the system clipboard. If the system clipboard is not accessible, it will instead use an internal clipboard.

Enabling clipboard support

On Windows (including WSL) and macOS, clipboard integration is supported out-of-the-box.

On Unix systems other than macOS, it is necessary to install some external dependencies. See runtime requirements.

For applications running remotely (e.g. through SSH), clipboard integration is supported in the following situations:

Additionally, it is always possible to paste text using your terminal emulator's own Paste command (usually Ctrl+Shift+V or Cmd+V).

API usage

To use the TClipboard class, define the macro Uses_TClipboard before including <tvision/tv.h>.

Writing to the clipboard

static void TClipboard::setText(TStringView text);

Sets the contents of the system clipboard to text. If the system clipboard is not accessible, an internal clipboard is used instead.

Reading the clipboard

static void TClipboard::requestText();

Requests the contents of the system clipboard asynchronously, which will be later received in the form of regular evKeyDown events. If the system clipboard is not accessible, an internal clipboard is used instead.

Processing Paste events

A Turbo Vision application may receive a Paste event for two different reasons:

In both cases the application will receive the clipboard contents in the form of regular evKeyDown events. These events will have a kbPaste flag in keyDown.controlKeyState so that they can be distinguished from regular key presses.

Therefore, if your view can handle user input it will also handle Paste events by default. However, if the user pastes 5000 characters, the application will behave as if the user pressed the keyboard 5000 times. This involves drawing views, completing the event loop, updating the screen..., which is far from optimal if your view is a text editing component, for example.

For the purpose of dealing with this situation, another function has been added:

bool TView::textEvent(TEvent &event, TSpan<char> dest, size_t &length);

textEvent() attempts to read text from consecutive evKeyDown events and stores it in a user-provided buffer dest. It returns false when no more events are available or if a non-text event is found, in which case this event is saved with putEvent() so that it can be processed in the next iteration of the event loop. Finally, it calls clearEvent(event).

The exact number of bytes read is stored in the output parameter length, which will never be larger than dest.size().

Here is an example on how to use it:

// 'ev' is a TEvent, and 'ev.what' equals 'evKeyDown'.
// If we received text from the clipboard...
if (ev.keyDown.controlKeyState & kbPaste) {
    char buf[512];
    size_t length;
    // Fill 'buf' with the text in 'ev' and in
    // upcoming events from the input queue.
    while (textEvent(ev, buf, length)) {
        // Process 'length' bytes of text in 'buf'...
    }
}

Enabling application-wide clipboard usage

The standard views TEditor and TInputLine react to the cmCut, cmCopy and cmPaste commands. However, your application first has to be set up to use these commands. For example:

TStatusLine *TMyApplication::initStatusLine( TRect r )
{
    r.a.y = r.b.y - 1;
    return new TStatusLine( r,
        *new TStatusDef( 0, 0xFFFF ) +
            // ...
            *new TStatusItem( 0, kbCtrlX, cmCut ) +
            *new TStatusItem( 0, kbCtrlC, cmCopy ) +
            *new TStatusItem( 0, kbCtrlV, cmPaste ) +
            // ...
    );
}

TEditor and TInputLine automatically enable and disable these commands. For example, if a TEditor or TInputLine is focused, the cmPaste command will be enabled. If there is selected text, the cmCut and cmCopy commands will also be enabled. If no TEditor or TInputLines are focused, then these commands will be disabled.

<div id="color"></div>

Extended color support

The Turbo Vision API has been extended to allow more than the original 16 colors.

Colors can be specified using any of the following formats:

Although Turbo Vision applications are likely to be ran in a terminal emulator, the API makes no assumptions about the display device. That is, the complexity of dealing with terminal emulators is hidden from the programmer and managed by Turbo Vision itself.

For example: color support varies among terminals. If the programmer uses a color format not supported by the terminal emulator, Turbo Vision will quantize it to what the terminal can display. The following images represent the quantization of a 24-bit RGB picture to 256, 16 and 8 color palettes:

24-bit color (original)256 colors
mpv-shot0005mpv-shot0002
16 colors8 colors (bold as bright)
mpv-shot0003mpv-shot0004

Extended color support basically comes down to the following:

Below is a more detailed explanation aimed at developers.

Data Types

In the first place we will explain the data types the programmer needs to know in order to take advantage of the extended color support. To get access to them, you may have to define the macro Uses_TColorAttr before including <tvision/tv.h>.

All the types described in this section are trivial. This means that they can be memset'd and memcpy'd. But variables of these types are uninitialized when declared without initializer, just like primitive types. So make sure you don't manipulate them before initializing them.

Color format types

Several types are defined which represent different color formats. The reason why these types exist is to allow distinguishing color formats using the type system. Some of them also have public fields which make it easier to manipulate individual bits.

TColorDesired

TColorDesired represents a color which the programmer intends to show on screen, encoded in any of the supported color types.

A TColorDesired can be initialized in the following ways:

TColorDesired has methods to query the contained color, but you will usually not need to use them. See the struct definition in <tvision/colors.h> for more information.

Trivia: the name is inspired by Scintilla's ColourDesired.

TColorAttr

TColorAttr describes the color attributes of a screen cell. This is the type you are most likely to interact with if you intend to change the colors in a view.

A TColorAttr is composed of:

The most straight-forward way to create a TColorAttr is by means of the TColorAttr(TColorDesired fg, TColorDesired bg, ushort style=0) and TColorAttr(int bios) constructors:

// Foreground: RGB 0x892312
// Background: RGB 0x7F00BB
// Style: Normal.
TColorAttr a1 = {TColorRGB(0x89, 0x23, 0x12), TColorRGB(0x7F, 0x00, 0xBB)};

// Foreground: BIOS 0x7.
// Background: RGB 0x7F00BB.
// Style: Bold, Italic.
TColorAttr a2 = {'\x7', 0x7F00BB, slBold | slItalic};

// Foreground: Terminal default.
// Background: BIOS 0xF.
// Style: Normal.
TColorAttr a3 = {{}, TColorBIOS(0xF)};

// Foreground: Terminal default.
// Background: Terminal default.
// Style: Normal.
TColorAttr a4 = {};

// Foreground: BIOS 0x0
// Background: BIOS 0x7
// Style: Normal
TColorAttr a5 = 0x70;

The fields of a TColorAttr can be accessed with the following free functions:

TColorDesired getFore(const TColorAttr &attr);
TColorDesired getBack(const TColorAttr &attr);
ushort getStyle(const TColorAttr &attr);
void setFore(TColorAttr &attr, TColorDesired fg);
void setBack(TColorAttr &attr, TColorDesired bg);
void setStyle(TColorAttr &attr, ushort style);

TAttrPair

TAttrPair is a pair of TColorAttr, used by some API functions to pass two attributes at once.

You may initialize a TAttrPair with the TAttrPair(const TColorAttrs &lo, const TColorAttrs &hi) constructor:

TColorAttr cNormal = {0x234983, 0x267232};
TColorAttr cHigh = {0x309283, 0x127844};
TAttrPair attrs = {cNormal, cHigh};
TDrawBuffer b;
b.moveCStr(0, "Normal text, ~Highlighted text~", attrs);

The attributes can be accessed with the [0] and [1] subindices:

TColorAttr lo = {0x892343, 0x271274};
TColorAttr hi = '\x93';
TAttrPair attrs = {lo, hi};
assert(lo == attrs[0]);
assert(hi == attrs[1]);

Changing the appearance of a TView

Views are commonly drawn by means of a TDrawBuffer. Most TDrawBuffer member functions take color attributes by parameter. For example:

ushort TDrawBuffer::moveStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TColorAttr attr);
ushort TDrawBuffer::moveCStr(ushort indent, TStringView str, TAttrPair attrs);
void TDrawBuffer::putAttribute(ushort indent, TColorAttr attr);

However, the views provided with Turbo Vision usually store their color information in palettes. A view's palette can be queried with the following member functions:

TColorAttr TView::mapColor(uchar index);
TAttrPair TView::getColor(ushort indices);

As an API extension, the mapColor method has been made virtual. This makes it possible to override Turbo Vision's hierarchical palette system with a custom solution without having to rewrite the draw() method.

So, in general, there are three ways to use extended colors in views:

  1. By returning extended color attributes from an overridden mapColor method:
// The 'TMyScrollBar' class inherits from 'TScrollBar' and overrides 'TView::mapColor'.
TColorAttr TMyScrollBar::mapColor(uchar index) noexcept
{
    // In this example the values are hardcoded,
    // but they could be stored elsewhere if desired.
    switch (index)
    {
        case 1:     return {0x492983, 0x826124}; // Page areas.
        case 2:     return {0x438939, 0x091297}; // Arrows.
        case 3:     return {0x123783, 0x329812}; // Indicator.
        default:    return errorAttr;
    }
}

  1. By providing extended color attributes directly to TDrawBuffer methods, if the palette system is not being used. For example:

    // The 'TMyView' class inherits from 'TView' and overrides 'TView::draw'.
void TMyView::draw()
{
    TDrawBuffer b;
    TColorAttr color {0x1F1C1B, 0xFAFAFA, slBold};
    b.moveStr(0, "This is bold black text over a white background", color);
    /* ... */
}

  2. By modifying the palettes. There are two ways to do this:

    1. By modifying the application palette after it has been built. Note that the palette elements are TColorAttr. For example:
    void updateAppPalette()
{
    TPalette &pal = TProgram::application->getPalete();
    pal[1] = {0x762892, 0x828712};              // TBackground.
    pal[2] = {0x874832, 0x249838, slBold};      // TMenuView normal text.
    pal[3] = {{}, {}, slItalic | slUnderline};  // TMenuView disabled text.
    /* ... */
}
    1. By using extended color attributes in the application palette definition:
    static const TColorAttr cpMyApp[] =
{
    {0x762892, 0x828712},               // TBackground.
    {0x874832, 0x249838, slBold},       // TMenuView normal text.
    {{}, {}, slItalic | slUnderline},   // TMenuView disabled text.
    /* ... */
};

// The 'TMyApp' class inherits from 'TApplication' and overrides 'TView::getPalette'.
TPalette &TMyApp::getPalette() const
{
    static TPalette palette(cpMyApp);
    return palette;
}

Display capabilities

TScreen::screenMode exposes some information about the display's color support:

Backward-compatibility of color types

The types defined previously represent concepts that are also important when developing for Borland C++:

ConceptLayout in Borland C++Layout in modern platforms
Color Attributeuchar. A BIOS color attribute.struct TColorAttr.
ColorA 4-bit number.struct TColorDesired.
Attribute Pairushort. An attribute in each byte.struct TAttrPair.

One of this project's key principles is that the API should be used in the same way both in Borland C++ and modern platforms, that is, without the need for #ifdefs. Another principle is that legacy code should compile out-of-the-box, and adapting it to the new features should increase complexity as little as possible.

Backward-compatibility is accomplished in the following way:

A use case of backward-compatibility within Turbo Vision itself is the TPalette class, core of the palette system. In its original design, it used a single data type (uchar) to represent different things: array length, palette indices or color attributes.

The new design simply replaces uchar with TColorAttr. This means there are no changes in the way TPalette is used, yet TPalette is now able to store extended color attributes.

TColorDialog hasn't been remodeled, and thus it can't be used to pick extended color attributes at runtime.

Example: adding extended color support to legacy code

The following pattern of code is common across draw methods of views:

void TMyView::draw()
{
    ushort cFrame, cTitle;
    if (state & sfDragging)
    {
        cFrame = 0x0505;
        cTitle = 0x0005;
    }
    else
    {
        cFrame = 0x0503;
        cTitle = 0x0004;
    }
    cFrame = getColor(cFrame);
    cTitle = getColor(cTitle);
    /* ... */
}

In this case, ushort is used both as a pair of palette indices and as a pair of color attributes. getColor now returns a TAttrPair, so even though this compiles out-of-the-box, extended attributes will be lost in the implicit conversion to ushort.

The code above still works just like it did originally. It's only non-BIOS color attributes that don't produce the expected result. Because of the compatibility between TAttrPair and ushort, the following is enough to enable support for extended color attributes:

-    ushort cFrame, cTitle;
+    TAttrPair cFrame, cTitle;

Nothing prevents you from using different variables for palette indices and color attributes, which is what should actually be done. The point of backward-compatibility is the ability to support new features without changing the program's logic, that is, minimizing the risk of increasing code complexity or introducing bugs.