Turbo Vision - Rust TUI Library

A Rust implementation of the classic Borland Turbo Vision text user interface framework. Relatively complete but still under (small) bug fixing.

Features

Complete UI Component Set: Windows, dialogs, buttons, input fields, menus, status bars, scrollbars
Z-Order Management: Click any non-modal window to bring it to the front
Modal Dialog Support: Modal dialogs block interaction with background windows
Borland-Accurate Styling: Menu borders and shadows match original Borland Turbo Vision
Scrollable Views: Built-in scrollbar support with keyboard navigation
Text Viewer: Ready-to-use scrollable text viewer with line numbers
Event-Driven Architecture:
- Three-phase event processing (PreProcess → Focused → PostProcess)
- Event re-queuing for deferred processing
- Owner-aware broadcast system to prevent echo back to sender
Mouse Support: Full mouse support for buttons, menus, status bar, dialog close buttons, scroll wheel, and double-click detection
Window Dragging and Resizing: Drag windows by title bar, resize by bottom-right corner
Flexible Layout System: Geometry primitives with absolute and relative positioning
Color Support: 16-color palette with attribute system
Cross-Platform: Built on crossterm for wide terminal compatibility
Modal Dialogs: Built-in support for modal dialog execution
Focus Management: Tab navigation and keyboard shortcuts
ANSI Dump: Debug UI by dumping screen/views to ANSI text files (F12 for full screen, F11 for active view, with flash effect)

Quick Start

use turbo_vision::prelude::*;
use turbo_vision::app::Application;
use turbo_vision::views::{
    dialog::Dialog,
    button::Button,
    static_text::StaticText,
};

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let mut app = Application::new()?;

    // Create a simple dialog
    let mut dialog = Dialog::new(
        Rect::new(20, 8, 60, 16),
        "Hello World"
    );

    let text = StaticText::new(
        Rect::new(22, 10, 58, 12),
        "Welcome to Turbo Vision!"
    );
    dialog.add(Box::new(text));

    let button = Button::new(
        Rect::new(35, 13, 45, 15),
        "  OK  ",
        CM_OK,
        true
    );
    dialog.add(Box::new(button));

    dialog.execute(&mut app.terminal);
    Ok(())
}

Tip: Press F12 at any time to capture full screen to screen-dump.txt, or F11 to capture active window/dialog to active-view-dump.txt - both with a visual flash effect for debugging!

Module Overview

core: Fundamental types (geometry, events, drawing, colors)
terminal: Terminal I/O abstraction layer
views: UI components (dialogs, buttons, menus, etc.)
app: Application framework and event loop

Documentation

See the examples for a complete simple examples.

Status

Currently implements:

✅ Core drawing and event system
✅ Dialog boxes with frames and close buttons
✅ Buttons with keyboard shortcuts
✅ Static text labels (with centered text support)
✅ Input fields
✅ Menu bar with dropdowns and keyboard shortcut display
✅ Status line with hot spots (hover highlighting, context-sensitive hints)
✅ Desktop manager
✅ Scrollbars (vertical and horizontal)
✅ Scroller base class for scrollable views
✅ Indicator (position display)
✅ Text viewer with scrolling
✅ CheckBoxes
✅ RadioButtons
✅ ListBoxes
✅ Memo (multi-line text editor)
✅ Mouse support (buttons, menus, status bar, close buttons, hover effects, listbox clicks, scroll wheel, double-click detection)
✅ Window dragging and resizing (drag by title bar, resize from bottom-right corner with minimum size constraints)
✅ Window closing (non-modal windows close with close button, modal dialogs convert to cancel)
✅ File Dialog (fully functional with mouse/keyboard support and directory navigation)
✅ ANSI Dump for debugging (dump screen/views to text files with colors)
✅ Input Validators (FilterValidator, RangeValidator with hex/octal, LookupValidator)
✅ Editor with search/replace and file I/O (load_file, save_file, save_as)
✅ EditWindow (ready-to-use editor window wrapper)
✅ OS Clipboard integration (cross-platform with arboard)
✅ Help System (markdown-based with HelpFile, HelpViewer, HelpWindow, HelpContext)

Architecture

This implementation closely follows Borland Turbo Vision's architecture, adapted for Rust:

Event Loop: Located in Group (matching Borland's TGroup::execute()), not in individual views
Modal Dialogs: Use Borland's endModal() pattern to exit event loops
View Hierarchy: Composition-based design (Window contains Group, Dialog wraps Window)
Drawing: Event-driven redraws with Borland's drawUnderRect pattern for efficient updates
Event System:
- Three-phase processing (PreProcess → Focused → PostProcess) matching Borland's TGroup::handleEvent()
- Event re-queuing via Terminal::put_event() matching Borland's TProgram::putEvent()
- Owner-aware broadcasts via Group::broadcast() matching Borland's message(owner, ...) pattern
Reference Implementation: Studied original Borland C++ source code in local-only/borland-tvision/

See local-only/ARCHITECTURAL-FINDINGS.md for detailed analysis of how Borland's C++ architecture maps to Rust.

Project Statistics

===============================================================================
 Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
===============================================================================
 Rust                   90        21640        16408         2058         3174
 |- Markdown            60         1510            5         1305          200
 (Total)                          23150        16413         3363         3374
===============================================================================

Generated with tokei - includes inline documentation

178 tests - all passing ✅

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

turbo-vision 0.3.0