alt Hacker NewsI have a question - I've briefly looked at the API, and it seems like a mostly general-purpose user interfance library.
What do you think of replacing the 'render' part with something that's more like a generic UI? You could keep the UX the same, yet your app would look like a desktop app (or at least close to it).
Trying to fit in the limitations of 80x25 text rendering is cool, but there's nothing in the underlying architecture that of modern graphics display that's predisposed to that, it all ends up as GPU commands.
I'm sure you could get most of the way to what I'm describing with just replacing the font/character set with one that renders things like borders in greater detail.
Hell, you could even add this as post-processing. You look at the terminal output with cellular automata like rules, and try to render UI primitives fitting that.
If you're redesigning a protocol layer, then I'd say you still want to target fixed size cells as the unit of rendering. It's just not the central abstraction like it is in the current terminal approach. Because you're one step above here, you have th ability to do better border handling. There's a lot a things you miss trying to force borders through a character set thing (e.g. missing characters depending on your font, missing ability to position borders naturally, interaction with background color, adjustment of size and space of rendered text due to interaction with unicode characters and fixed positioning) ...
But in general, going with a fresh new protocol allows you to do a bunch of things semantically that are currently done as pure graphical stuff and that's useful.