Today I release Tattoy to the world. Formally, it's a text-based terminal compositor, but I'll let the homepage go into more details about what that actually entails. Here I'd like to talk a little about what inspired me to make it and what the experience of developing was like.

What would a new terminal protocol without ANSI codes look like? There are many ways to think about how the inner workings of modern terminal protocols could be improved. But just for the sake of argument and to keep things simple, let's imagine doing nothing more than deprecating ANSI all codes and letting CLI applications manipulate rendering det…