> If I could draw a whole frame in a reasonable amount of time, this problem would be much easier! But I can't. Using Core Text, it can easily take over 150ms to draw a single frame for a 4k display on a 2015 macbook pro.
Holy cow! I wonder if iTerm2 would benefit from using something like pathfinder[1] for text rendering. I mean, web browsers are able to render huge quantities of (complex, non-ASCII, with weird fonts) text in much less than 150ms on OS X somehow; how do they manage it? Pathfinder is part of the answer for how Servo does it, apparently.