Glossary¶

Grid¶

A two-dimensional array of cells representing the entire render surface.

Cell¶

A single position in the grid. Contains: - A grapheme cluster - Style information - Continuation metadata

Grapheme Cluster¶

A user-perceived character, potentially composed of multiple Unicode codepoints (e.g., emoji sequences, combining marks).

Wide Glyph¶

A grapheme cluster occupying two grid cells.

Continuation Cell¶

The trailing cell of a wide glyph. Must never be rendered independently.

RenderOp¶

A structured mutation applied to the grid.

Renderer¶

The component that applies RenderOps to a grid and returns damage information.

Damage¶

A conservative set of rectangles indicating which grid regions may have changed.

Full Redraw¶

A damage state indicating the entire grid should be repainted.

Determinism¶

The guarantee that identical inputs produce identical grid state.

Wire Format v1¶

A stable serialized representation of rendering operations or grid state.

Backend¶

A projection layer that converts grid state into a target format (terminal, SVG, PNG, etc.).

State Transition¶

The application of one or more RenderOps resulting in a new grid state.

Canonical¶

Refers to a single deterministic representation of logically equivalent state.

Serialization¶

The process of converting structured state into Wire Format.

Mutation¶

Application of a RenderOp resulting in state transition.

Projection¶

Conversion of grid state into a backend-specific representation.