[feature request] Complete boxes please about cli-ui

[jules2689]

The boxes lend a really good visual indicator of when things start and end.
We use it internally to help separate errors from other things, with good success.
I'd be hesitant to remove that.

[jules2689]

it's mostly a style choice, but also facilitates copy paste, wrapping, etc.

It greatly simplifies the code as well. We don't have to calculate the end of the line and pad things on the right. You might also notice that we don't really do line wrapping, so end of the line doesn't even work in some cases unless we start automatically splitting up lines.

We would entertain any PRs for this, of course 😊

[burke]

Yeah, the reason we haven't done this is that with complete boxes, the line essentially becomes a whooole lot of spaces, and copy/pasting gets very extremely bad, as opposed to the current state of "pretty bad". I haven't tested it but I strongly suspect performance would suffer too: writing spaces isn't free. We could probably jump to the end of the line with CHP9999 or something but I'm not optimistic that it would be much faster.

[chall8908]

@burke you'd also have to walk back in if you're rendering sub-frames. Otherwise, the boxes will overlap on the right side of the screen and look all weird.

I wonder if it might look better without the top and bottom bars being all the way across the screen - although, that does make it really easy to see where blocks start. Maybe something like this:

┏━━ Outermost Title
┃ ✓ A thing
┃┏━━ Inner Title
┃┃ Some text
┃┃┏━━ Innermost Title
┃┃┃  ✗ A failing thing
┃┃┗━━ (0.5s)
┃┗━━ (0.6s)
┗━━ (1.6s)

Or even:

┏┳━ Outermost Title
┃┃ ✓ A thing
┃┃┏┳━ Inner Title
┃┃┃┃ Some text
┃┃┃┃┏┳━ Innermost Title
┃┃┃┃┃┃  ✗ A failing thing
┃┃┃┃┗┻━ (0.5s)
┃┃┗┻━ (0.6s)
┗┻━ (1.6s)

Either would remove the box illusion. I know I had a slightly negative initial reaction to the lack of a border on the right side.

[chall8908]

So, I decided to see how difficult it would be to modify the frame styles generally and discovered that it was actually pretty easy to do. I have a working prototype and will probably put a PR up once I get some better documentation written.

Example: