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France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
55•nar001•1h ago•28 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
323•theblazehen•2d ago•108 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
44•AlexeyBrin•2h ago•8 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
23•onurkanbkrc•1h ago•1 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
725•klaussilveira•16h ago•225 comments

Software Engineering Is Back

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
52•alainrk•1h ago•50 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
986•xnx•22h ago•562 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
109•jesperordrup•7h ago•43 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
22•matt_d•3d ago•4 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
79•videotopia•4d ago•12 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
143•matheusalmeida•2d ago•37 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
245•isitcontent•17h ago•27 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
252•dmpetrov•17h ago•130 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
5•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
348•vecti•19h ago•154 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
515•todsacerdoti•1d ago•250 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
397•ostacke•23h ago•102 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
49•helloplanets•4d ago•50 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
313•eljojo•19h ago•194 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
363•aktau•23h ago•189 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
443•lstoll•23h ago•292 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
4•sandGorgon•2d ago•2 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
78•kmm•5d ago•11 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
98•quibono•4d ago•24 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
26•bikenaga•3d ago•14 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
283•i5heu•19h ago•232 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
48•gmays•12h ago•19 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1093•cdrnsf•1d ago•474 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
313•surprisetalk•3d ago•45 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
69•gfortaine•14h ago•30 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.