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I'm currently trying to do pretty cli apps, my goal is to make a box that makes the whole outline of the terminal.

What I currently do:

  • Grab the size of the terminal
  • Draw the top line : top-left corner + (width - 2) * top edge + top-right corner
  • Draw left and right borders : "\r\n|" + (width - 2) * " " + "|"
  • Draw the bottom line : bottom-left corner + (width - 2) * top edge + bottom-left corner

And I put all this in a loop and refresh it 30 times per second. The problem is that when the terminal is resized, some edges are offset and displayed in the middle of the screen for a small amount of time.

How can you avoid these small glitches ? Is it possible to tell the terminal to not display anything while the user is resizing or something like that ?

Thanks in advance

Thomas Dickey
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Florentin Labelle
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1 Answers1

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The question:

How can you avoid these small glitches ? Is it possible to tell the terminal to not display anything while the user is resizing or something like that ?

You can't entirely avoid that. Applications which deal with window-resizing catch SIGWINCH (rather than relying on repeatedly checking the size), and repaint the screen. If that is "fast enough", it is not really noticeable.

When catching SIGWINCH, it is also possible for those to arrive too frequently to respond to each one. An application has to allow for that (by omitting repainting when it starts to fall behind).

Thomas Dickey
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  • Thank you for your answer, it is indeed a better way to handle a screen resize. I tried to make it so that when a first SIGWINCH is catched the screen is cleared and after some time without SIGWINCH I redraw the frame. It removes most of the artifacts but not all, but I guess it is all about timing things right. – Florentin Labelle Mar 24 '23 at 10:43