Expand description
The terminal renderer for makeover_layout.
Named for the target and not for ratatui, the same way
makeover-immediate is named for the mode and not for egui.
§What a terminal actually costs you
Not colour. That was the original assumption here and it is wrong on any
terminal built this decade. Measured across the 31 shipped themes
(makeover’s well_fidelity example):
| ANSI-16 | ANSI-256 | truecolor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| a well collapses onto its face | 18/31 | 4/31 | 2/31 |
| at least one bevel edge vanishes into its face | 31/31 | 4/31 | 0 |
The threshold is 256, not 24-bit, and the two failures that survive at
truecolor are not terminal failures at all: they are the themes whose
raised surface is already white, so the lightening clamps and the well
lands exactly on its face. Those render identically in a browser.
makeover’s own well_is_distinct_from_its_face test already names them.
What a terminal costs is geometry, and no amount of colour fixes it.
An edge occupies a whole cell on each side. A cell is roughly 8x17 pixels,
so a one-pixel bevel becomes something an order of magnitude heavier, which
is why frame hands back a shrunk Rect instead of pretending the
region survived intact. There is nowhere to put a corner radius, so
radius_control and radius_container mean the same thing here. A fill
can only begin and end on a cell boundary.
That is the constraint worth designing against. It does not improve, it is not detectable, and it applies equally to the best terminal ever written.
§Where fidelity does matter
At Fidelity::Ansi16 the depth vocabulary collapses outright: a well
cannot be filled distinctly on most themes and a bevel loses an edge on
every one of them, so a raised card and a well both read as a single-tone
box. Colour cannot carry the distinction, so frame carries it with the
glyphs instead.
Above that, colour carries it and the glyph fallback never fires.
Palette::shows is worth reading correctly in light of the numbers: it
is not a low-colour workaround. It is a correctness check that a fill
will be visible against what is behind it, and at truecolor it fires on
exactly the two clamping themes, which is precisely when it should.
§The correction this renderer forced
makeover_layout::Fill briefly carried a fallback method, returning
Page for Well so a consumer without surface-well had something to
use. That is an answer for a renderer that can always paint a colour. Here
it is actively wrong: page is the surface a well is usually cut into, so
falling back to it produces the exact invisibility the fallback was meant
to avoid.
Substituting one intent for another is renderer policy, not description.
The fallback moved out of the description and into
makeover-immediate, where it belongs, which is the first thing a second
renderer was built to find.
Structs§
- Palette
- The resolved colours this renderer needs.
Enums§
- Fidelity
- How many colours the terminal can actually show.
Functions§
- frame
- Draw a region at a given
Depthand return the area left for content. - paint_
bevel - Paint a two-tone edge around the outside of
area.