Terminal

As a learning exercise to sharpen my Rust programming skills, I recently toyed with writing a small program that uses a terminal-based user interface which I built using the Cursive crate developed by Alexandre Bury. Cursive provides a high-level framework for building event-driven terminal applications using visual components such as menu bars, text areas, lists, dialog boxes, etc. Conceptually, developing with Cursive is one level of abstraction higher than using a library such as ncurses, which provides a more raw interface to managing screen contents and translating updates to the terminal's native language. In fact, Cursive defaults to using ncurses as one of several possible backends, and allows setting themes to customize various text colors and styles.

I decided to try using GNOME Terminal with ugly fonts — that is, bitmap fonts which are not anti-aliased. The goal of this experiment was to improve terminal performance when scrolling large amounts of information in a big window. At the end of the day, the performance was not improved in my case. (I have my monitor rotated 90° for a portrait display, and I think my use of rotation may be a bottleneck for my graphics throughput.) However, I decided to keep the ugly fonts anyway, since it seems to allow me to use smaller fonts without sacrificing legibility.