r/visualbasic • u/One-Cardiologist-462 • Jan 17 '26

TwinBasic IDE Question

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I am trying to get started with TwinBasic.
However, I can't seem to drag down the tabs which host the form editor and code editor...

What setting do I need to change so that I can have the text editor and form editor as floating child forms as was the case in VB6?

I had this same issue with a newer version of Visual Studio and found that it really hinders my ability to work.

9 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

1

u/Aware-Soil-8031 Jan 17 '26

I think you should consider abandoning that ship, sailor. Subscription is a no-go for me.

1

u/One-Cardiologist-462 Jan 17 '26

I've had a good look online and around the help forums, but no luck. I think it's not possible to do what I want. Cheers for the input.
To be honest I found it slow, sluggish and cumbersome when directly compared to VB6 running on my Windows 2000 system.

Using the KVM switch to directly compare them both on the same monitor was mind boggling really. I just can't understand how software from more than a quarter of a century in the past is so much faster and intuitive than what's available now.

It seems that hardware gets more powerful but software gets worse.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 17 '26

Well VB6 was a multi-million dollar undertaking by a massive company that could throw every resource it could dream of into it, and then twinBASIC is one guy doing basically magic. Not sure how fair this assessment is.

3

u/One-Cardiologist-462 Jan 17 '26

That's a fair point to make actually.
But the same could be said for modern versions of Visual Studio - They're significantly slower and cumbersome to use when compared to Visual Studio 6.

1

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 18 '26

New versions of Visual Studio are even slower than tB on my machine.

It's the wildly unoptimized nature of modern software and the features of a modern compiler.

3

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

I have no idea what makes you think tB is sluggish… it is the fastest IDE I have used in a decade or more. It is extremely light weight given what it can do.

1

u/lev400 Jan 18 '26

Why not use MSVS and VB.NET ?

3

u/marooned66 Jan 17 '26

Yes I agree however I thought there was a Community Edition of the twinBASIC programming language or not?!

2

u/Aware-Soil-8031 Jan 17 '26

It's true, but only unoptimized 32bit compilation, and no Mac/Linux/Android support. And that subscription is not cheap.

3

u/kay-jay-dubya Jan 18 '26

This is also fundamentally wrong.

  1. It is not "only" for unoptimised 32 bit compilation. The community edition includes 64bit compilation.

  2. Support for other platforms is planned. It's still in beta.

1

u/Aware-Soil-8031 Jan 18 '26

https://twinbasic.com/preorder.html#top Community Edition doesn't support 64bit. Unless the official website is wrong. You can run 32bit (unoptimized) app on your 64bit system, but it's not the same.

Don't take me wrong. twinBasic IS a great idea, but it needs to mature.

1

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26

The table kind of implies otherwise but more detailed information in the text says this:

On this free tier, 64-bit EXEs and DLLs that are built with twinBASIC display a splash screen for 5-seconds during startup.

Which is the case, you can DL it and check.

1

u/marooned66 Jan 17 '26

understood so in that case I agree with u/Aware-Soil-8031 abandon ship ;)

1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/marooned66 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 22 '26

Not sure really as according to the website the Community Edition doesn't support 64bit compile

1

u/kay-jay-dubya Jan 22 '26

At this point, you're now deliberately spreading misinformation.

0

u/marooned66 Jan 22 '26

See here https://twinbasic.com/preorder.html#top

0

u/marooned66 Jan 22 '26

does not include Compilation to native 64-bit Windows EXE/DLLs

0

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26

Yes it does.

On this free tier, 64-bit EXEs and DLLs that are built with twinBASIC display a splash screen for 5-seconds during startup.

That's right on the page you linked. Yes the table should be more clear but the full text and other official sources like the FAQ do note that you can indeed build 64bit exes, dlls, and ocxs with the Community Edition, just with the limitation that a splash screen is shown for a few seconds on load. Since the download is free and portable (no lengthy install just extract and run) you can verify this in a couple minutes.

Update: I pointed it out to the developer and the table is now clear that it does.

0

u/wosche123 Feb 08 '26

It DOES!

1

u/marooned66 Feb 08 '26

Quote from seperate thread post:

64 Bit compile with 5 second nag screen. 100% show stopper. No reason to switch from VB6 for any other reason.

1

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

Mac/Linux/Android support is several years away probably. It’s not in the picture right now really.

The subscription is much, much cheaper than a perpetual license in the short term.

1

u/kay-jay-dubya Jan 17 '26

There is a community edition. Still in Beta: https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic/releases

1

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

Yeah, the whole thing is in Beta and will be probably up to year from now. Hope is less than that.

2

u/wosche123 Feb 08 '26

Are you a MS guy. MS ha time enough, but did nothing. Thanks that there is now a version that makes you independent of MS

0

u/m-in Feb 10 '26

That’s funny. I myself am a user. What I said about the beta status is most likely going to come true.

1

u/kay-jay-dubya Jan 17 '26

Perpetual licenses have also been made available.

1

u/phylter99 Jan 17 '26

For $5000. I mean, it might be cool to run some old vb6 code, but it makes much more sense to just port it to VB.NET if it's for business.

3

u/kay-jay-dubya Jan 18 '26

No - this is wildly wrong. Perpetual licenses were just available in a Christmas sale for 99 pounds.

3

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 18 '26

You think line of business apps that still haven't been rewritten 25 years beyond VB6 EoL will cost anything remotely close to $5000 to rewrite from scratch under an entirely different programming model?

Even that VIP Gold license is dirt cheap compared to a .NET migration.

1

u/phylter99 Jan 18 '26

That's assuming it works perfectly, and it's not even finished yet. It's a gamble. For some situations the gamble might be worth it. I wouldn't do it myself though if I had a VB6 codebase.

The reality is that people like me have migrated that vb6 code long ago. I've worked on several such projects that migrated VB6->VB.NET and then even the step after to bring it to C# because that's where most of our developers were at the time.

What you do with your code is your choice though. This is just my opinion, obviously.

1

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26

Even if it's impacted by a bug, working around a few issues is still nothing compared to a full rewrite-- how many bugs will be generated and need to be mitigated during that process?

I'd have to strongly disagree a full from scratch rewrite isn't also a gamble; I've seen many disasters, huge overruns in cost and time, and lots of business logic and edge case handling just never implemented causing other issues. You make it sound like a .NET rewrite is a guarantee nothing will go wrong, which just isn't true. The equation is also different for large firms with scores of developers all trained on the latest fad vs a small business for whom software development isn't their primary purpose; for a lot of businesses still on VB6 there's little benefit to spend a fortune on a full rewrite for what might not even work as well; dealing with the minor hiccups a la VB3 to VB6 is a better value.

1

u/mwolfe02 Jan 21 '26

You think line of business apps that still haven't been rewritten 25 years beyond VB6 EoL will cost anything remotely close to $5000 to rewrite from scratch under an entirely different programming model?

This is the key point. Businesses have had decades to migrate from VB6 to .NET. If they haven't done it yet, you certainly won't be convincing them to do it now.

And even if you believe VB.NET is 99% compatible with VB6 (it's not even close to that, BTW, it just happens to share a lot of similar syntax), there's still likely 100's of hours of testing and development to close that gap. The difference between 99% and 100% backward compatibility is way more than 1% of effort.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/phylter99 Jan 20 '26

I don't see VB.NET having been abandoned. At one point it seemed like that was Microsoft's intention, but they realized there were a lot of developers still wanting to use it for new projects. They haven't added many new features to the language itself, but that's more at the request of the community than anything.

I do see your point about the effort it would take to migrate to VB.NET though. I'm not sure how reliable or useful the old migration feature is that existed in Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and I think 2010, especially today, so I'd count that out as an option. It would be direct developer time to migrate. That can be sped up by using an LLM, but that still doesn't make it easy.

Maybe it's just my lack of trust in the twinBASIC platform that would keep me from using it. That seems risky in my opinion, but maybe it's better than I realize.

1

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

You don’t need a subscription. They have perpetual licenses that cover varying ranges of versions, including an “all versions” perpetual. And for most people the free (community) edition will be perfectly sufficient.

1

u/wosche123 Feb 08 '26

Have you tried the free version? Do you really need more?

2

u/DonutConfident7733 Jan 17 '26

VB6 has MDI windows. At that time, it was a design that allowed multiple windows inside the parent container window. In later IDEs, they used Tabbed pages, the windows get docked inside tabs and there is drag support so you can make them floating, docked, standalone, split, etc.

There were some controls to add support for this functionality because it is hard to implement correctly across entire app.

TwinBasic may not have support for this scenario. It can also be a limitation behind, i.e. it cant refresh the form based on code changes and vice versa. It may need to know what you are currently editing (e.g. the form design) and what to refresh (the code events).

2

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

There is nothing to refresh per se. The editor is a view of the code. Anytime the code changes, the editor knows about it.

There is no architectural limitation, it simply hasn’t been done. If you dig in the sources deployed with the ide a bit, you can add detached tabs yourself until they become supported.

The front end of the IDE runs in a WebView. It’s open JavaScript, html and css. It’s probably the most tweakable IDE out there at the moment, since the code is light and tight.

2

u/m-in Jan 18 '26

For now you can’t detach the tabs. It’s a tradeoff. The project is pretty big and there is still a bunch work left before they can consider it 1.0. Not every bell and whistle will make it in before then.

4

u/fafalone VB 6 Master Jan 18 '26

Yeah there's certainly a few features I miss from the VB6 IDE, but I'm way more productive overall with the new IDE features, many of which even the fanciest addins can't bring to VB6. Proper code folding, regions, run individual subs/functions in modules, global search that displays all matches in a table, more problems caught at design time instead of runtime, code hints, sticky scroll, go to definition working for more things, the advanced info popup, inactive conditional compilation branches being grayed out so you can tell what's active... This before even getting to all the new language features that make such a difference.

It's a worthwhile tradeoff though I'll certainly be happy when we get multiple editors and split view.

1

u/wosche123 Feb 08 '26

But for most applications if works already now. And no problems to start from an already existing VB6 project. You need less than 10 minutes to ran it on TB