Turbo Vision

Turbo Vision is a character-mode text user interface framework included with Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Borland C++ circa 1990. It was used by Borland itself to write the integrated development environments (IDE) for these programming languages. By default, Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support. Later it was deprecated in favor of Object Windows Library, the Win16 API, and the GUI tools of Borland Delphi.

Around 1997, the C++ version, including source code, was released by Borland into the public domainTvision "What about copyrights? [...] According to a FAQ entry in the Borland's site (was in http://www.inprise.com/devsupport/bcppbuilder/faq/QNA906.html when I saw it) the code is public domain. I also asked in the Borland's newsgroup and the TeamB people (not official people but they are who give technical support in the net) said me the FAQ was right."Turbo Vision - by Borland Developer Support Staff on community.borland.com/ "Question: Where can I find the public domain version of Turbo Vision? Answer: It can be found at ftp.inprise.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/archive/turbovision/" (1998, archived). Several developers and developer teams have worked on their own versions of the framework afterwards. Some of them have been listed in the table below.

The Pascal version, which was distributed alongside Borland Pascal 7 on a "bonus" disk, was never released under a free software license, so the Free Pascal project recreated its own version by backporting a clone made by Leon de Boer that ran in graphical mode back to textmode. The result is called Free Vision. Over the years this codebase has grown stable on nearly all operating systems and architectures that FPC supports. The textmode IDE is very close to the original TP environment, with built-in compiler and IDE much closer than e.g. RHIDE, and supporting functionality like code folding.

Unicode support

One of the factors limiting Turbo Vision's popularity was the absence of Unicode support in the original Borland version. As of October 2020, there are Unicode versions for C++ and Free Pascal.

Third-party implementations + Third-party Turbo Vision implementations Project name Active Latest release Last update Unicode support Language Graphical Platforms License Turbo Vision (magiblot) No stable releases (according to GitHub) (UTF-8) C++ DOS, Linux, Windows MIT Free Vision FPC 3.2.2 (since February 2022) Pascal Most platforms supported by FPC (tested on Linux and Windows) LGPL with linking exception TVision port to the GNU compiler 2.0.3 C++ DOS, FreeBSD, Linux, QNX, Solaris and Win32 GPL Port for Virtual Pascal 2.1 Build 279 No information Pascal Windows, OS/2, Linux No information GraphVision 2.01 No information Pascal DOS (graphics mode) No information TVision (Sergio Sigala) 0.8 C++ Linux and FreeBSD BSD-like Port for TMT Pascal Not specified No information Pascal DOS (TMT Pascal) No information Graphics Vision (MKM Software) 3.0 (DOS/DPMI/Windows), 2.10R2, 2.01 (DOS) No information Pascal DOS, Windows, Linux (GV/FPC), DPMI Free for individual use, commercial license, DOS libraries - LGPL Super Vision 2.2 No information Pascal DOS (SVGA) No informationTurbo Vision for Rust 1.0.018 November 2025 Rust MacOS, Windows, LinuxMIT

Applications using Turbo Vision

Dos Navigator IBM Handshaker SET Edtor RHIDE OSPlus Text editor TMBasic NE (NO EDLIN) EditV IDA (DOS version) turbo (text editor) tvterm (terminal emulator)

Turbo Vision

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