This terminal protocol draws borders on cell edges, so they cost zero rows and columns
Terminal borders that don't cost a cell
Ratatui maintainer Joshka has built a terminal protocol that draws thin lines on cell edges instead of using box-drawing glyphs, so borders no longer eat a row and column on every side. It's implemented as a Ghostty patch, with an earlier version in Rio, and demoed with Ratatui apps: panes, tabs, underlined text fields, rounded buttons, and braille charts with gridlines. Borders are cell attributes like background color, so they scroll and erase with text and never get copied. He's seeking feedback from terminal and TUI authors.
Select some text inside a box and you get the box too. Everyone who's pasted from a TUI into Slack knows the little │ cleanup dance.