Posts in October, 2022

I get a kick out of being creative within the limitation of the terminal. I may even have come up with with an entirely new way of drawing boxes in the terminal. As bizarre as that sounds.

Boxes in the terminal are not new. Rich is full of them, but they predate Rich by a long time.

CLI apps will typically use box drawing characters to build boxes out of unicode characters. There are characters for vertical lines, horizontal lines, corners, and cross pieces. With a mixture of regular, heavy, and double lines. Even rounded corners. They work like lego: throw them together in the right order and you can display exotic things such as panels and tables at the command prompt.

But there is a problem. Look what happens when you set a background color:

A Rich panel. continue reading…