Jexer Work Log

July 15, 2017

I think I have cleaned up most of the window show/hide/activate mess in TApplication. Demo4 has some cool interactions between a background TDesktop and several foreground TWindows, which helped expose bugs.

July 9, 2017

While working on TWindow.hide/show I decided that I am sick of TApplication’s active window handling. TApplication makes lots of assumptions, things are too fragile between modal and not, and one cannot easily say window.activate(). So I will also be changing that too. … Code is still a bit of a mess, but hooks are in place at least for show/hide/activate.

July 8, 2017

Qodem 1.0.0 released last month, I had a vacation, and a Jexer user (nikiroo) started opening up pull requests. :-) So back unto the breach we go!

TButton is now animated so that there is some feedback when selected via keyboard. StringJustifier was written which permits TText’s to have left/centered/right and full justification. TDesktop is now in too which can act as a permanent max-sized window without borders.

Next up is Viewport, an interface to collect scrollbar API, and then a cleaner API for scrollable widgets and windows. After that is more window API: hide/show/maximize/restore, and unclosable windows. I am cherry-picking bits from @nikiroo’s PRs, which will likely break them before it fixes things, but I will find some way to get Niki credited with those pieces.

March 21, 2017

I am starting to gear up for making Jexer a serious project now. I’ve created its SourceForge project, linked it back to GitHub, have most of its web page set up (looks like Qodem’s), and released 0.0.4. And then this morning saw an out-of-bounds exception if you kill the main demo window. Glad I marked it Alpha on SourceForge…

Yesterday I was digging around the other Turbo Vision derived projects while populating the about page, and made a sad/happy-ish realization: Embarcadero could probably get all of them shut down if it really wanted to, including Free Vision. I uncovered some hidden history in Free Vision, such that it appears that Graphics Vision had some licensed Borland code in it, so there might be enough mud in the air that Free Vision could be shut down the same way RHTVision was. But even worse is the SCOTUS ruling on Oracle vs Google: if APIs are copyrighted (regardless of their thoughts on fair use), then any software that matches the API of a proprietary project might find itself subject to an infringement case. So that too could shut down the other API-compatible TV clones.

Fortunately, Jexer (and D-TUI) is completely new, and has no API compatibility with Turbo Vision. Jexer could be a new root to a whole generation of TUI applications.

March 18, 2017

TStatusBar is working, as is “smart” window placement. Overall this is looking quite nice. Found a lot of other small paper cut items and fixed them. It looks absolutely gorgeous on Mac now.

Tomorrow I will get to the public wifi and get this uploaded.

Time to call this 0.0.4 now though. We are up to 32,123 lines of code.

March 17, 2017

Jexer is coming back to active development status. I had a lot of other projects ahead of it in the queue, mostly Qodem but also Jermit and of course lots of actual day job work keeping me too tired for afterhours stuff. But here we are now, and I want to get Jexer to its 1.0.0 release before the end of 2018. After that it will be a critical bit of function for IWP and NIB, if I ever get those going. I need to re-organize the demo app a bit so that it fits within 80x25, and then get to TStatusBar.

A status bar will be an optional part of TWindow. If it exists, then it will be drawn last by TApplication and get events routed to it from TWindow’s event handlers. This will have the nice effect that the status bar can change depending on which window is active, without any real extra work on TApplication’s part.

Putting together a proper TODO now, with release and regression checklists. I think I will see if jexer is available at SourceForge, and if so grab it. Perhaps I can put together some good Turbo Vision resources too. At the very least direct people to the Borland-derived C++ releases and Free Vision.