# Turbo Vision

26 Hacker News commenters recommended Turbo Vision and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a long-admired object-oriented framework for building terminal user interfaces, praising its original DOS-era design. Main caveat: documentation is hard to find.

## Why people recommend it

- Object-oriented design and architecture (4 comments): "Besides a nice OOP architecture, collections, iteration with callbacks, serialization, in a nice AOT compiled language with blazing compile times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352030)) "had a great object model, in which you could derive built-in classes implementing controls, windows, validators etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056002)) "The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369313))
- Great for building terminal UIs (5 comments): "I really haven't seen anything better for making TUIs than Borland's Turbo Vision framework" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089135)) "Building TUIs was already super easy in 1990 with Turbo Vision and Clipper on MS-DOS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012692)) "one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365817))
- Nostalgia for its DOS-era design (4 comments): "something that I could already enjoy in 1990's with Turbo Vision" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191928)) "Turbo Vision for a long time was for me like a golden standard." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898830)) "working with this TV library scratches my nostalgia itch :D" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900792))
- Modernized port with Unicode support (2 comments): "the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898872)) "saw it was updated for Unicode, etc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47899642))

## What people warn about

- Documentation is hard to find (2 comments): "when you work with TV and ask google - you usually get... not much." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900538)) "If anything such documentation is what's lacking nowadays." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47899961))
- Dated, pushes TUI limits (2 comments): "TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366763)) "I've had enough of turbo vision back in the 90s" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831604))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ratatui](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ratatui.md): 57 recommend
- [Bubble Tea](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bubble-tea.md): 37 recommend
- [Textual](https://hackerapproved.com/p/textual.md): 34 recommend
- [Ink](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ink.md): 13 recommend
- [Charm Ruby](https://hackerapproved.com/p/charm-ruby.md): 12 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Turbo Vision", https://hackerapproved.com/p/turbo-vision/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).