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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that if you put such a box on top of other content you blank out part of the content.

Any full box in the terminal takes up two full rows top and bottom, and two full columns left and right, this is no different.

It's a clever trick actually, though it doesn't compose the way the traditional box-drawing characters do. Good for one (1) box, where you want to be able to set the background without bleed.

I'm talking about how it looks if the box partially covers other content.

A 1-dimensional, 1-sided horizontal example would be if you have abcdef in the background partially covered by ABCDEF in the foreground. With a vertical bar in the middle, it looks like

    abc|ABCDEF

However, with this new technique it looks more like:

    abc |ABCDEF

(approximation, notice the space; also this example assumes a different stacking as used in the article, which brings the problem in the x-direction which is convenient in this example)

I'm not quite following your meaning here - it's terminal characters, there's no way to do alpha blending, right? So putting any character on top of another character would always replace it.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33218894

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