alt Hacker NewsAny diff would require to have a Before and an After. Whatever was done for the After can be done to directly render the changes. No need for the additional compute of a diff.
Any diff would require to have a Before and an After. Whatever was done for the After can be done to directly render the changes. No need for the additional compute of a diff.
Sure, you could just draw the full new screen image (albeit a bit inefficient if only one character changed), and no need for the flicker-inducing clear before draw either.
I'm not sure what the history of log-output has been or why it does the clear-before-draw. Another simple alternative to pre-clear would have been just to clear to end of line (ESC[0K) after each partial line drawn.