alt Hacker NewsI'm confused as well, could someone who knows how TUIs work explain what's the point of React-style diffing in this context? I thought you need to clean and full redraw if anything changs anyways?
Replies
qudat • last Sunday at 4:39 PM
You can do damage tracking for TUIs. Printing to the terminal is done by moving the cursor and redrawing the line the cursor is on.
delusional • last Sunday at 4:26 PM
Ncurses is how people used to do it.
> I thought you need to clean and full redraw if anything changs anyways?
Unless you use an ancient teletype, you don't have to redraw everything. That would make any interactive applications way too slow/flickery.
You can move the cursor arbitrarily in the terminal and start overwriting characters from there. So you need to track state to know what is "dirty" and needs refreshing. Occasionally you issue a full redraw to catch missed artifacts left behind or when the terminal is resized (SIGWINCH).