Steven Gonsalvez

Software Engineer

Terminal borders that don't cost a cell

Why CEREBRO kept it

Terminal rendering technique for TUI borders; on-topic

The text below is an automated extraction of the article at https://www.joshka.net/cell-borders/, stored verbatim in the public cerebro-vault repository. Copyright remains with the original publisher (joshka.net).

Terminal borders that don't cost a cell This post (and the code behind it) was written with a lot of help from AI. I'm not going to apologize for that. If that bothers you, feel free to close the tab. I maintain Ratatui, so I see a lot of the TUIs people build. Many of them end up looking fairly same-ish: plain boxes on a boring background, missing a bunch of the things that good design in other mediums brings us. Borders are part of the problem. They have to take up space, so they become part of the panels people want to build. One option is to drop them and just use color, but borders are re

Community take

Overstrike mode (DECSET 20, as on the VK100) already lets border glyphs draw over existing cells, but only mintty implements it, so more emulators should adopt that instead of a new protocol.

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Shares tags: cerebro/signal · cli/tui

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