December 20, 2025
Inception, but make it text
A terminal emulator that runs in your terminal. Powered by Turbo Vision
Old-school terminal app inside a terminal has devs nostalgic, confused, and very loud
TLDR: tvterm is a retro-styled terminal app that runs inside a terminal, showcasing Turbo Vision and libvterm with modern color and cross-platform support. Comments split between nostalgia, demands for non-C++ language bindings, and comparisons to TWIN, making it a lively debate about old-school charm versus practical versatility.
A new experiment called tvterm promises a terminal emulator that literally runs inside your terminal, powered by the retro-cool Turbo Vision framework. The crowd instantly split into camps: nostalgia die-hards cheered, with one fan gasping, “Who knew Turbo Vision was still being used,” while griping about modern tools that feel clunky by comparison. Cue the “terminal-ception” jokes and a lot of eyebrow-raises at a project that’s mostly a demo for shiny features like 24-bit color and future text magic. It uses libvterm—the same engine behind code-editor legends Neovim and Emacs—and works on both Windows and Unix.
Then came the language wars. One commenter cut to the chase: “Are there any bindings for other languages than cpp?” Translation: please don’t make this C++-only. Meanwhile, a retro showdown brewed when another asked how tvterm stacks up against TWIN, an older text-window system—classic vs classic, who wins? Under the hood, tvterm is still WIP (work in progress), with planned goodies like scrollback, text selection, and smart resizing. But the community drama is the real show: some want a polished app, others just want the throwback vibes, and everyone’s comparing it to everything. The GitHub link is here for the brave: tvterm.
Key Points
- •tvterm is an experimental terminal emulator built on the Turbo Vision framework to showcase features like 24-bit color.
- •It relies on Paul Evans’ libvterm, a library also used by Neovim and Emacs.
- •The project supports Unix and Windows platforms (Windows 10 version 1809 or later).
- •Building requires CMake, a C++14-compatible compiler, and dependencies including libvterm, libncursesw (Unix), and optional libgpm (Linux).
- •The project is a work in progress with planned features such as UTF-8 handling, scrollback, text selection, find, signal sending, text reflow, and multiple emulator backends.