About & History

I’ve had a thing for printing since I started programming on an Apple ][+ in 1981. My first money-making endeavor was “Tapes”, which printed casette tape ‘J-cards’ for all the mix-tapes of great ’80s music we made for the girls. Whenever I learned a new programming language or OS, the first app I’d write was Spit, an app for printing my source code all pretty (it “spits” source code out of a printer). Over the years, I wrote Spit for AppleDOS (Apple BASIC), UCSD-Pascal, CP/M (Turbo Pascal), DOS (8086 assembly and C), VAX/VMS (Pascal and FORTRAN-77), and Mac (Pascal).

In 1988, as a college junior at the University of Arizona (Go Cats!), I decided Windows was going to win over OS/2 and I was going to work for Microsoft. I bought Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows and conned my dad into buying me a copy of the Windows 2.0 SDK (which was like $300 back then!). On my amazeballs ALR 386/33 PC I set about becoming a Windows programmer. The first useful app I wrote was WinSpit. In a rare moment of adulting, I renamed the app WinPrint and listed it on CompuServe as shareware ($25). For over ten years I received $25 checks the mail from folks all over the world. Even better, WinPrint demonstrated to Microsoft I could actually, really write code and they hired me.

Several times in the early 1990s I started writing WinPrint 2.0. Each time I had the basics working and realized three things: 1) Nobody cares about printing source code, 3) I’d over-engineered things, and 2) the technology I choose was already dated (e.g. MFC). Two of those abandoned efforts can be found in my GitHub archive here (1992) and here (1994).

In 2019 got a wild-hair to write some code as a way of blowing off steam, and proving to myself I was still cool. It all started with Microsoft releasing the Cascadia Code font. I have a thing for fixed-pitch fonts. It’s weird. Anyway, I installed the font in Terminal and VScode but just looking at stuff didn’t satisfy me. I needed to use the font in anger! So I fixed some long-standing issues in MCE Controller (another app I wrote that nobody uses anymore).

This all led to me re-discovering my old WinPrint 2.0 source code. Reminiscing on how much time I wasted back then, and how effective it was as a procrastination tool, I just had to try again. So I did. And, just to be clear, here’s what I did:

1) I wrote a printing app in 2019-2020. Nobody prints these days. I don’t even print anymore. 2) I over-engineered it. It has a full GUI with print preview. Headers and Footers with Macros. PowerShell and scriptable command-line interfaces. It can syntax-highlight source code with bundled TextMate grammars. It’s written in C# using modern .NET. And more. 3) I used .NET and C#. Ok, this part I can defend (assuming you get past point #1 and #2): First, I know C# well and it is awesome. Second, no other modern language/app-framework can even SPELL “print”. I tried both Electron and Flutter and both suck when it comes to printing.

That was WinPrint 2.0.

Then, after shipping the most popular framework for building terminal (TUI) apps, Terminal.Gui, and adding graphics support, I realized WinPrint would be really cool as a terminal app… imagine Print Preview IN THE TERMINAL. I also rewrote the GUI to work as well on the Mac as it did on Windows.

This is WinPrint 3.0. I hope you enjoy it!

-tig (@tigkindel on X; see my blog)

License (MIT)

Copyright (c) Kindel, LLC

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