Comment by camgunz
2 years ago
To build on to sibling chrismorgan's excellent post, fixed-width fonts/ASCII art/Unicode drawing are a really elegant way to get 80% of what you'd ever want. Getting to 100% involves a full-on rendering system and markup which is 10x the work and complexity. To date, most people don't want that in their editor.
Yet the most popular editor is vscode which is browser based and has all the rendering tech just sitting there, largely unused.
I got an answer to a similar problem that VSCode needs working cursors out of the view where the text is not rendered. That is why it relies on the text grid for all layout and movement. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/142738#issuecomme...
Fair, but the markup bit is still killer. Imagine the engineering hours that have been spent avoiding writing plain old HTML.