Software

This section is about some of the software I wrote for fun in my spare time.

Boxes and Tal, the programs on this page, might still be of interest today. Some of the older programs date back as far as the 1980s, when I was in high school. Those programs are of course not at all useful anymore, but still fun to look at!
Do have a look at them in the

--> Software Museum  (with screenshots).

Present Day Software

These programs can be run on present-day workstations, like for example a laptop with Windows XP installed, or a Linux machine.

Boxes (-> home page)

boxes
Boxes has drawn an HTML comment box around this text
Purpose:
Configurable text filter for drawing and maintaining ASCII text boxes
Date:
1999 / 2000
Technology:
ANSI C, flex, bison, regex
Many operating systems, including Win32 and Linux
License:
GPL v2
Highlights:
Boxes is a text filter which can draw boxes around its input. Users can define all kinds of custom boxes in Boxes' own programming language. The boxes might be simple comment boxes for computer programs or complex ASCII Art boxes. Boxes can also be removed and repaired, even when damaged.
The program is quite popular and has received great support from the community. It was part of several Linux distributions (one of them Debian). The Windows port was done by Ron Aaron, the guy who also ported the gcc compiler to Win32. Boxes was talked about in Linux Magazine issue 38 (Jan 2004), and Linux User magazine issue 12/2003.
Status:
Mature and stable, but of course there is a wish list.

Tal (-> home page)

Tal
tal has aligned the backslashes on a long C macro definition
Purpose:
Text filter for the alignment of line endings
Date:
1997 / 1998
Technology:
ANSI C
Many Unixes, Linux, Win32, MS-DOS
License:
GPL-like custom license
Highlights:
tal is a filter that reads in a number of lines from standard input, then tries to determine an ending that all those lines have in common. Those common trailing characters are subsequently aligned, so that they all begin and end on the same column of text. Very flexible, integrates well with text editors.
Status:
Mature and stable

ThomasJensen.com vi improved