A much better alternative to this would be to for more terminal emulators to implement overstrike mode (DECSET 20, as available on the VK100). That way you could just draw border characters over existing text cells to achieve the same thing.
Unfortunately mintty is the only terminal emulator I'm aware of which supports overstrike [0], as this would open up a world of new possibilities for TUI apps if more widely supported.
I’m not against overstrike, but I can think of one drawback of that solution: it becomes significantly harder to have rounded corners with a filled interior.
But I’m not trying to argue for nor against either solution.
I love this work and everything else Ratatui does but I have to ask: if you're changing the terminal protocol and the terminal itself to do this, why not do something more ambitious; a full monospaced information-dense UI framework, a terminal designed for user interfaces, rather than one designed to replicate the limitations of dumb terminals?
Text terminal with every keystroke round-tripped through the server is not a design that makes sense for any reason other than backwards compatibility. It's kind of annoying to design for and atrocious for performance.
I appreciate the innovation happening with TUIs in these modern times. But, aesthetically, I have to say, I like my borders to have some breathing room, which gets lost in this particular treatment.
Why wouldn’t this work over tmux? The authors claims don’t make a whole lot of sense because if this were a cell property, like any other CSI, then it’ll get rendered in the terminal emulator exactly as intended. And we know this because none of the other CSI sequences get garbled over multiplextors.
But for there to be a dedicated section on how multiplexors wouldn’t work suggests to me that the authors already tried this via tmux.
So I’m left wondering what they’ve done with the implementation of this to make that a problem.
I spotted they are using DCS sequences. But even that shouldn’t be an issue itself.
Afraid that’s a contradiction. In this role, HTML is a pile of hacks upon hacks that was not originally intended for UIs.
But, yeah, people are trying to reinvent GUIs. By layering hacks over TTYs. If only there’d be some protocol for widgets and events over a stream connection…
Unfortunately mintty is the only terminal emulator I'm aware of which supports overstrike [0], as this would open up a world of new possibilities for TUI apps if more widely supported.
[0] https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#overstrike
But I’m not trying to argue for nor against either solution.
But for there to be a dedicated section on how multiplexors wouldn’t work suggests to me that the authors already tried this via tmux.
So I’m left wondering what they’ve done with the implementation of this to make that a problem.
I spotted they are using DCS sequences. But even that shouldn’t be an issue itself.
In fact it just makes it less secure.
> instead of hacks on top of hacks
Afraid that’s a contradiction. In this role, HTML is a pile of hacks upon hacks that was not originally intended for UIs.
But, yeah, people are trying to reinvent GUIs. By layering hacks over TTYs. If only there’d be some protocol for widgets and events over a stream connection…