Turbo Vision for Rust

The Borland text-mode UI framework, rebuilt in Rust. Menus, windows, dialogs, validators, editors and palettes, drawn in a terminal, on a desktop that still looks like 1991.

Get started What's new Browse the user guide

What it gives you

The crate is a full port of Borland's class library, not a lookalike. The class tree TView → TGroup → TWindow → TDialog survives as a stack of Rust traits, the event model is the same three-phase dispatch, the palettes are the original Borland colour tables, and the commands still start at cmQuit. If you wrote Turbo Vision in Pascal or C++ you already know most of this library.

• :material-application-outline: An application shell

  A menu bar, a status line, a desktop with draggable, resizable, shadowed windows, and a modal loop that behaves like TProgram::run.

• :material-form-textbox: Real controls

  Input lines, buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, scroll bars, trees, split panes, progress bars, tooltips and history dropdowns.

• :material-check-decagram: Validators

  Filter, range and picture validators, wired into input lines the way Borland wired them, so a dialog refuses to close on bad data.

• :material-file-document-edit: An editor

  A text editor view with selection, clipboard, undo and syntax highlighting, plus the file-open and change-directory dialogs that go with it.

• :material-palette: The Borland palettes

  The palette chain is pushed down the view tree at draw time, so a control picks up its colour from the window that owns it, exactly as the original did.

• :material-console-network: A terminal layer

  A Backend trait with a crossterm implementation, an optional SSH server behind a feature flag, and a mock terminal your tests can draw into and read cells back from.

Thirty seconds of code

use turbo_vision::core::status_data::StatusItemBuilder;
use turbo_vision::prelude::*;
use turbo_vision::views::status_line::StatusLine;

fn main() -> turbo_vision::core::error::Result<()> {
    let mut app = Application::new()?;

    let (w, h) = app.terminal.size();
    app.set_status_line(StatusLine::new(
        Rect::new(0, h as i16 - 1, w as i16, h as i16),
        vec![
            StatusItemBuilder::new()
                .text("~Alt-X~ Exit")
                .key("Alt+X")
                .command(CM_QUIT)
                .build(),
        ],
    ));

    app.run();
    Ok(())
}

Where to go next

If you want to	Read
Build your first application	Getting started then Chapter 1
Follow a complete worked project	The biorhythm calculator tutorial
Understand the trait layering	Views and groups and the design document
Port a C++ Turbo Vision program	The application model, side by side
See what changed in 3.0.0	What's new

It looks like this

Credits

Built by Enzo Lombardi, from Borland's original Turbo Vision 2.0 and the kloczek C++ port. MIT licensed.