Turbo Go, or 90s nostalgia

My first real IDE was Borland's Turbo Pascal editor (or maybe QBasic 🤓), and I have to admit I missed it a lot, especially when I'm in a terminal. The closest thing to it is the Midnight Commander text editor, but it's not development oriented.

For the (much) younger ones among you who probably never got to know Turbo Pascal (or Turbo C and Turbo C++), it looked like this:

So, like I was saying, I missed it: a simple but powerful editor, where I don't need to type !wq to get out ... troll ... And what if AI gave me a hand on this one? I've been polishing development skills, quality skills, ... for a few months now, so it was a good test subject: I wanted to build a Turbo Go 🚀. And the test was conclusive 🎉! So today let me introduce my little Turbo Go, an old-school IDE/editor with modern features.

Now, it's not "battle tested" yet, but it's already usable. I keep working on it and I still need to "polish" the docs, which for the moment are generated automatically. I've been able to test Turbo Go on macOS and Linux (the Windows binary exists, but I need to find a bit of time).

Installing Turbo Go

You can find the binaries of the latest release (v1.0.3 ) over here: https://rickub.com/turbo-editors/turbo-go/releases/v1.0.3.

I work on macOS, and here's how I do it:

# download the binary release in https://rickub.com/turbo-editors/turbo-golo/releases
VERSION=1.0.3
curl -fsSLO "https://rickub.com/turbo-editors/turbo-golo/releases/download/v${VERSION}/turbo-golo-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64"
chmod +x ./turbo-golo-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64
xattr -cr ./turbo-golo-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/turbo-golo
sudo cp ./turbo-golo-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/turbo-golo

And now I can launch Turbo Go from anywhere with the turbo-go command.

For the other operating systems, I'll let you figure it out (but I'll update the README.md once I'm done with my tests, or I'll write some "quick starts").

Launching Turbo Go - first contact

So, Turbo Go is configurable with .toml files, but for this post, I've prepared a ready-made configuration (over here: turbo-editors/configs) that you can install like this:

cd demo # or any other directory
turbo-go -load-config https://rickub.com/turbo-editors/configs/tree/main/golang-init

Output:

Copied .turbo-go from https://git.rickub.com/turbo-editors/configs.git (main):
  settings.toml
  snippets.toml
  tools.toml

So now you have this in your ./demo directory:

.
└── .turbo-go
    ├── settings.toml
    ├── snippets.toml
    └── tools.toml

And you can launch turbo-go:

Using Turbo Go - Quick Tour

Start by saving the file as main.go:

Then use the snippets menu and select main:

There you go, you have a first program to get started:

With a bit of completion as a bonus:

Then run a go mod init:

And we can finally run the program:

Now, we could have done the same thing faster from a terminal, and that works out nicely, because we have a terminal in Turbo Go! 📺 :

You can also get the list of your project's files:

Then, for a bit more clarity, tidy up your windows:

I also added LSP support (it can be improved, but it's a start):

That's it for this quick tour of Turbo Go.

Oh, by the way, you can change the theme:

So, do you actually use it?

Well, yes, I use it. The goal was to have a tool to code quickly and comfortably, and also to use my brain a bit more 😉.

At first, it was also for fun, but I'm discovering that this very minimal editing mode is also a good way to discover other languages, and in parallel I'm evolving, at the same time as Turbo Go, other editors for other languages (which are on my todo list):

• Turbo Rust
• Turbo Python
• Turbo JS (I already know it, but it's handy)
• Turbo Golo (my favorite language 🥰)
• Turbo Moonbit (a very nice functional language for doing WebAssembly)

and probably more to come ...

And what's next?

Since I really like playing with local LLMs, I added support for ACP (Agent Client Protocol) so I can use them from the Turbo Editors, but I'll tell you about that later:

Stay tuned 🤗, and if you too ask AI to help you build the tools you're missing, feel free to add a comment, I'm very curious to hear about your creations.