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P2P crypto exchange development company

1•sonniya•3m ago•0 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
1•jesperordrup•8m ago•0 comments

Write for Your Readers Even If They Are Agents

https://commonsware.com/blog/2026/02/06/write-for-your-readers-even-if-they-are-agents.html
1•ingve•8m ago•0 comments

Knowledge-Creating LLMs

https://tecunningham.github.io/posts/2026-01-29-knowledge-creating-llms.html
1•salkahfi•9m ago•0 comments

Maple Mono: Smooth your coding flow

https://font.subf.dev/en/
1•signa11•16m ago•0 comments

Sid Meier's System for Real-Time Music Composition and Synthesis

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5496962A/en
1•GaryBluto•23m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Slop News – HN front page now, but it's all slop

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4•keepamovin•24m ago•2 comments

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2•sickthecat•29m ago•1 comments

White House Explores Opening Antitrust Probe on Homebuilders

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1•petethomas•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MindDraft – AI task app with smart actions and auto expense tracking

https://minddraft.ai
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How do you estimate AI app development costs accurately?

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Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 5

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Show HN: MCP Server for TradeStation

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Canada unveils auto industry plan in latest pivot away from US

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3•breve•40m ago•1 comments

The essential Reinhold Niebuhr: selected essays and addresses

https://archive.org/details/essentialreinhol0000nieb
1•baxtr•42m ago•0 comments

Rentahuman.ai Turns Humans into On-Demand Labor for AI Agents

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1•tempodox•44m ago•0 comments

StovexGlobal – Compliance Gaps to Note

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1•AbduNebu•48m ago•0 comments

Trump says America should move on from Epstein – it may not be that easy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4gj71z0m0o
6•tempodox•48m ago•3 comments

Tiny Clippy – A native Office Assistant built in Rust and egui

https://github.com/salva-imm/tiny-clippy
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LegalArgumentException: From Courtrooms to Clojure – Sen [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmMQbsOTX-o
1•adityaathalye•56m ago•0 comments

US moves to deport 5-year-old detained in Minnesota

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8•petethomas•59m ago•3 comments

If you lose your passport in Austria, head for McDonald's Golden Arches

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RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

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3•init0•1h ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

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1•trojanalert•1h ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

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2•fkdk•1h ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

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3•ukuina•1h ago•1 comments

Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)

1•au-ai-aisl•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Twin – A Textmode WINdow Environment

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
156•kim_rutherford•7mo ago

Comments

kristopolous•7mo ago
Reminds me of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView

It'd be interesting to try this concept again on the wildly different computers we have now compared to 40 years ago.

4k monitors, high speed networks, dozens of cores, things are significantly different - might open some wildly exciting and new possibilities

skissane•7mo ago
Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows

Although I’ve never succeeded in locating a copy of the spec, any implementations, even a screenshot… would be great if any of them turned up some day

eschaton•7mo ago
This should have enough to build either an emulator or a window manager.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/displayIndustryAssociation/AlphaWi...

skissane•7mo ago
Also there is a firmware dump for the HP 700/70 which implemented it: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/terminal/700/HP_700_70_C1093/

Likewise for the Televideo 995-65: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/televideo/995/firmware/

jd3•7mo ago
I'm a fan of the tiles/patterns from DESQView/X

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044021

kristopolous•7mo ago
I got Desqview/X running about 25 years ago on some Everex. An X Terminal that ran win16 software - Useless but fascinating.

IIRC there was some additional minimal runtime stuff like perl/awk/sed that came with it kinda like MinGW later on

johng•7mo ago
Same experience here. It blew my mind but it wasn't really useable.
boznz•7mo ago
and Borland Turbovision
ivolimmen•7mo ago
... and visual basic 1.0 for DOS
nickdothutton•7mo ago
Got hold of a free copy of this as a student, on underpowered PCs at college and it was a superpower.
icedchai•7mo ago
I was just about to same the same thing! I remember briefly running DESQview on a 386SX, before installing Linux...
matt3210•7mo ago
Peak UI for sure!
behnamoh•7mo ago
Does it support Liquid Glass? :')
snvzz•7mo ago
Last I checked (easily been a decade) it had a major limitation in not supporting Unicode.

I wonder if this was ever resolved.

JdeBP•7mo ago
It seems to have supported UTF-8 for at least a decade. Although it went the full-on ECMA-35 route of making that an optional switchable character set.

There was an issue back in 2016 where, ironically, it was coming up in Latin-1 mode with everything else around it talking UTF-8, and there have been other similar impedance mis-matches over the years. But they seem to hinge on it actually having UTF-8 support.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/4

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/7

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/8

However: There was no 256 colours support as of 2021.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/30

And in some places it even required IBM code page 437.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/22

And some of the doco seems to have never been incorporated.

* https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/issues/100

cosmos0072•7mo ago
Author here :)

I've been using Twin as my everyday terminal emulator and terminal multiplexer since ~2000, slowly adding features as my free time - and other interests - allowed.

As someone pointed out, the look-and-feel reminds Borland Turbo Vision. The reason is simple: I started writing in in the early '90s on DOS with a Borland C compiler, and I used the Borland Turbo Vision look-and-feel as a visual guideline (never actually looked at the code, though).

The porting to linux happened in 1999 (it was basically dormant before that), and Unicode support was progressively added around 2015-2016 (initially UCS-2 i.e. only the lowest 64k codepoints, then full UTF-32 internally, with terminal emulator accepting UTF-8). There are still some missing features, most notably: no grapheme clusters, no fullwidth (asian etc.) support, no right-to-left support.

Right now I'm adding truecolor support (see https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor) - it's basically finished, I'm ironing out some remaining bugs, and thinking whether wire compatibility with older versions is worth adding.

And yes, documentation has been stalled for a very long time.

Retrospectively, I should have switched C -> C++ much earlier: lots of ugly preprocessor macros accumulated over time, and while I rewrote the C widget hierarchy as C++ classes, several warts remain.

panzi•7mo ago
Do symbols for legacy computing work with it? Especially the 1/8ths vertical/horizontal blocks?
cosmos0072•7mo ago
If you mean the Unicode glyphs listed at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements they are supported - you just need a display driver that can render them. For example, `twin --hw=xft` (it's the default) or `twin --hw=X11`, both with a font that contains them
JdeBP•7mo ago
Xe means the Unicode block that is actually named "Symbols For Legacy Computing". It's not in the BMP. Some bloke named Bruce was doing TUI windows with scrollbars and sizer/menu boxes some years before TurboVision and code page 437. (-:
panzi•7mo ago
Indeed I meant these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing

I use them in some tiny hobby projects like these:

https://github.com/panzi/progress-pride-bar

https://github.com/panzi/bad-apple-terminal

https://github.com/panzi/js-unicode-bar-chart

https://github.com/panzi/js-unicode-plot

https://github.com/panzi/js-unicode-progress-bar

https://github.com/panzi/python-term-flags

JdeBP•7mo ago
Reading the flags one: Unscii has font coverage, if you want to try that out on the emulators whose fonts were problems.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812026

JdeBP•7mo ago
Given that it's drawing TUI windows, the MouseText characters for doing that very thing on the Apple IIe would seem even more pertinent.

* https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114409020672330885

JdeBP•7mo ago
Alas, it's not finished. You've made the mistakes that all of us have made, and haven't caught up with us, must of us having fixed those mistakes, a few years back when implementing 24-bit RGB was in vogue.

This is not, as the function name suggests, a colon, but per ITU/IEC T.416 it should be:

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...

And not only should this have colons too, but per ITU/IEC T.416 there's a colour space parameter that goes in there:

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/blob/truecolor/server/hw/hw...

The unfortunate part is that when rendering to a terminal, you don't have any available mechanism apart from hand-decoding the family part of the TERM environment variable, and knowing who made which mistakes, to determine which of the 7 possible colour mechanisms are supported. They are:

1. ECMA-48 standard 8 colour, SGRs 30 to 37, 39, 40 to 47, and 49

2. AIXTerm 16 colour, ECMA-48 plus SGRs 90 to 97 and 100 to 107

3. XTerm 256 colour, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;5;n and SGR 48;5;n

4. XTerm 256 colour corrected, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:5:n and SGR 48:5:n

5. 24-bit colour take 1, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38;2;r;g;b and SGR 48;2;r;g;b

6. 24-bit colour take 2, ITU T.416 done wrongly with SGR 38:2:r:g:b and SGR 48:2:r:g:b

7. 24-bit colour take 3, ITU T.416 done right with SGR 38:2::r:g:b::: and SGR 48:2::r:g:b:::

Few people support 4, and although quite a lot of us have finally got to supporting 7 it isn't quite universal. Egmont Koblinger, I, and others have been spreading the word where we can over the last few years.

This is where I was at in 2019:

https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TerminalCapa...

There a few updates to that that are going to come out in 1.41, but when it comes to colour they're mainly things like recognizing the "ms-terminal" and "netbsd6" terminal types in the right places.

cosmos0072•7mo ago
Yep, I am well aware of the `;` vs `:` confusion in both 256 color and 24-bit color control sequences.

Short of hand-coding "which terminal supports which variant" I do not know any standard mechanism to detect that (beyond the well-known $TERM=...-256color and $COLORTERM=truecolor or $COLORTERM=24bit)

I guess I'll have to add command line options to choose among the variants 1...7 you helpfully listed above.

My main use it to render twin directly on X11, which avoids all these issues, and while rendering inside another terminal is important and is not going away, I am OK with a few minor color-related limitations (note: limitations, not bugs) in such setup, especially if the other terminal does not follow the relevant standards

skissane•7mo ago
> This is not, as the function name suggests, a colon, but per ITU/IEC T.416 it should be

Digressing, but I’m fascinated to see ODA still being referenced, even if only some small part of it

Lio•7mo ago
Glad to see it's still going.

It amuses me that that a project that started in 1993 is still versioned at 0.9.0 for it's latest stable release.

It's a good reminder that version number don't necissarily denote stability.

panzi•7mo ago
Wonder if my ansi-img image viewer works in that. Won't compile this from source to test it, but if it's in my Linux distribution I'll do later.
panzi•7mo ago
Nope, only garbage output: https://imgur.com/a/RVNitFh

Is there a way to configure another terminal font? But it's not just the font, the terminal seems to also crash. At least it's not responsive anymore and has to be closed.

cosmos0072•7mo ago
You can choose the font with `twin --hs=X11,font=X11FONTNAME` or `twin --hw=xft,font=TRUETYPEFONTNAME`

I will have a look too, the terminal should not crash or stop being responsive

panzi•7mo ago
Thank you. Weird that this isn't in the man page or --help message. Another font didn't fix anything anyway.
cosmos0072•7mo ago
I tried compiling https://github.com/panzi/ansi-img and running it inside the truecolor branch of twin, i.e. https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/tree/truecolor and it correctly displayed an example JPG I tried - no artefacts, and terminal remained responsive.

As I wrote above, I am debugging it and fixing some known issues, thus truecolor support is not yet in the default branch

okflo•7mo ago
I remember somewhen in the 90s, having a 386er Linux system with 8MB RAM, experimenting with twin... So cool, that this project is still alive!
Jotalea•7mo ago
I wonder if it would be possible to use ANSI escape colors for making gradient window decorations, or simulating transparency on them.