Building a TUI that doesn't fight the terminal

Terminal UIs are a constraint engine: fixed cells, no sub-pixel anything, and a user who can resize you at any moment. The trick is to embrace it instead of emulating a browser.

Redraw only what changed

The naive loop clears and repaints the whole screen every frame. It flickers and burns CPU. Diff the cell buffer and write only the deltas.

Box-drawing characters and a tight color palette do all the visual work. No images, no chrome — just cells.