In 2003, Juan Vuletich, by then an active collaborator in the Squeak project, decided that a zoomeable and scalable GUI was needed for Smalltalk. This would require completely abandoning back compatibility with the existing Morphic in Squeak. So, the Cuis Smalltalk project was started, although it was named much later.
The focus has always been to develop a general purpose Smalltalk system that doesn't include application specific code by default, and only includes basic functionality. This makes it easy to evolve, and it doesn't mandate extra burden on the developer.
A friendly and enthusiastic community has formed around it, developing additional code packages and applications.
Some landmarks in the project are:
This is the point where the Smalltalk image that would later be called Cuis started to diverge from Squeak 3.7. The initial objective was to remove Etoys and other applications, resulting in a bare Morphic Smalltalk system that would not include any application specific code. Work started on September 2004, shortly after Squeak 3.7 was released.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-February/087571.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-February/087756.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-February/088763.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-February/088787.html
http://www.jvuletich.org/Squeak/EToysFreeMorphic/EtoysFreeMorphic.html
After preparing a reasonable base for further development of Morphic, Juan started working on the "Morphic 3" project. It would take three years of study, pondering and experimentation to come up with something worth showing.
Until this moment, Squeak, like Smalltalk-80, only had 1 bit bitmap fonts that used to look reasonably good on the old cathode ray displays, but looked extremely pixelated on any modern display. Juan developed the techniques to allow high quality, anti-aliased, sub-pixel rendered bitmap fonts using only the existing VM support, including colored and alpha-blended text. He also built several font sets, that were enhanced over time. This work was developed for the reduced Squeak image, but was also adopted by Squeak and Pharo.
http://www.jvuletich.org/issues/Issue0010.htm
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-April/115930.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-April/115948.html
Morphic 3 ended up being a redesign of the Morphic framework using Floating Point local coordinates, Vector Graphics and high quality rasterization. At the very first Smalltalks conference in Buenos Aires, Juan presented the preliminary results of three years of intense research and development.
Videos and additional details at: http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/Smalltalks2007/Smalltalks2007.html
[Ann] Cuis: A new Squeak distribution When it started to be clear that neither Squeak nor Pharo would rebase their codebase on our reduced kernel image, Juan decided to turn it into an Open Source, Community Maintained, Smalltalk system, as a separate project.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2009-March/134986.html
First public presentation of Cuis at the Smalltalks conference in Buenos Aires. Also demoed Morphic 3 and LightWidgets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8HniJhVxlA
You can see more about the early development of the projects at: The Morphic 3 Project, Morphic 3 in action
Support for true BlockClosures. Requires a newer, closures-enabled VM.
When full block closures were implemented in Squeak, and support added to the VM, we ported them to Cuis. At the same time, Cuis kept advancing towards our objectives, and many parts of the system continued to be cleaned and simplified.
New, modern look. Themes. We keep improving Cuis usability, and make the development tools look better, including more conventional looking (i.e. less colorful) Dark, Light and HighContrast UI themes.
Code Packages. In addition to the ever shrinking Kernel Image, we enable the development of code Packages that can be loaded as needed. This lets us decouple and better structure different parts of the system, and better distribute their development amongst developers. Over time, we developed over 30 packages that are distributed with Cuis, and over 20 GitHub repositories with additional packages developed and maintained by community members.
We decided that a discussion forum specific for Cuis is a good idea. Still, most people are also active members of the Squeak and/or Pharo communities.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-May/164142.html
Adopting GitHub as our code repository greately eases project managing, gives us wider visibility, and protects the future of the project.
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev
A defensive disclosure on the techniques used in the project was published. This meant the code could now be open-sourced without worries of someone else trying to get a patent on it.
Prefiltering Antialiasing for General Vector Graphics, (also here).
The OpenSmalltalk project keeps developing modern VMs for Open Source Smalltalk systems. We add Cuis images in the new Spur 32 and 64 bits formats to be used with them, in addition to the existing V3 32 bit image for existing VMs.
At this point, Cuis is the only Smalltalk system that runs with exactly the same source code for the whole system, on 32 and 64 bits, and with many VM flavors and platforms, including:
- Cog Spur 64 (High Performance 64 bits, jitted, for Intel)
- Cog Spur 32 (High Performance 32 bits, jitted, for Intel)
- Cog V3 (Good performance 32 bits, jitted, for Intel)
- V3 Classic Interpreter (32 bits, portable code. Runs on any processor)
- SqueakJS (32 bits, runs in a web browser on any platform)
So we can run in at least one VM flavor in MacOS, Linux (Intel, ARM), Windows and Web Browsers. With some effort it is possible to run on Android, IOS, RISC OS. In the past, we have also ran on Solaris, OS/2, and bare metal.
All this also means that we don't need to maintain forked code bases to support this wide array of VMs and platforms. Developers of applications and tools need to focus on a single code base and always get platform independence for free.
100% Smalltalk code. Top visual quality, surpassing the native font rasterizers used by MacOS, Windows and Linux. No need for FreeType or any other external library.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2019-May/000184.html
Hilaire Fernandes lead the creation of a book written specifically for people learning about Cuis and Smalltalk. Read the online version or download the pdf version.
While the redesign of Morphic had always been done in the Cuis image, the experiments with VectorGraphics were done separatedly. Now, the implementation of the VectorGraphics Morphic Canvas and Engine matured, and they were added as optional packages to the main Cuis Smalltalk repo. This also enabled support for SVG morphs and files in Cuis.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2020-August/002157.html
Later, the VectorEngine was added to the official OpenSmalltalk VMs. VectorGraphics became reliable and performant, and can now be used as the main UI for Cuis and applications developed with it.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2021-March/002849.html
The hierarchy of fundamentel Morph classes was reorganized. As this could affect compatibility, a new major version release was done.
Unicode support in Text Editors, Files and Smalltalk selectors and variables. Now, after selecting 'Preferences / Use Unicode text', the full range of Unicode characters can be used anywhere, and files are saved in Utf-8 format, including Smalltalk code.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2022-May/005654.html
All code files are UTF-8. All Strings and code in the image can hold Unicode. All text is rasterized by our Vector Graphics engine from TrueType font definitions.
A new framework for bootstrapping Smalltalk images in the Spur format. A new binary, precompiled format for Smalltalk libraries that can be dynamically bound to a running image.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2023-October/008099.html
First release of Cuis following a new Release Process: Cuis 6.2 Stable Release. Traditional Rolling Release is now 6.3.
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2023-December/008269.html