Why do terminal emulators still have screen flicker

Why are there still visual artifacts when terminal emulators draw text-based applications? This on recent computers that render 3D games and GUI windows including anti-aliased vector fonts with no artifacts.

I regularly see the following artifacts which reveal intermediate steps of the screen update process:

• Terminal cursor motion (cursor blinks or jumps around the screen during update)
• Tearing (part of screen shows old stuff while other part is showing new stuff)
• Scrolling (scrolling is noticeable, instead of new scroll position being shown right away)

The artifacts are only seen for sub-second intervals, and not during most screen updates, but having grown up on flicker-free GUIs I would still like to know how to avoid them. All of the above artifacts (except scrolling) can be seen in e.g. the following ASCIInema video once it starts drawing the more complex screens: MapSCII – the whole world in your console!

I'm also specifically not talking about slow updates. It would be nice if updates were always instantaneous, but that's not always possible due to network and processing delays. What I mean here is that partially drawn screens are often visible for a brief moment. In most modern GUIs only fully finished screens are shown to the user, and artifacts of partial drawing are very rare.

It's my impression that the terminal emulation pipeline goes something like this:

1. User presses a key on the keyboard
2. Kernel passes keypress from keyboard driver to window system
3. Window system passes keypress to terminal emulator
4. Terminal emulator passes keypress to pseudo-terminal (pty) kernel device
5. Pty interprets keypress and passes the result to text-based application
6. Application performs command in response to keypress
7. Application renders new screen (character cell grid) to internal buffer
8. Application calls curses or other library to convert character cell grid to ANSI escape codes that will render an equivalent screen on the terminal
9. Library writes those ANSI escape codes to the pty device
10. Pty processes the written data somehow
11. Terminal emulator reads processed data from pty in some chunks
12. Terminal emulator calls window system to render the result of the ANSI escape codes in terminal window

Which of the above steps can slow down the process enough that the terminal emulator shows us intermediate rendering steps instead of showing only the final result?

• It seems that the speed of hardware terminals (serial port connections) is dictated by their baud rate which can be changed with tcsetattr() but I read from multiple sources that the baud rate setting has no effect on the pseudo-terminal (pty) devices used by terminal emulators. Does this mean that Unix kernels do not deliberately rate-limit pty communications?

• Do applications or rendering libraries (curses, etc.) send text and ANSI codes in multiple writes instead of trying to make do with only one write()?

• Unix kernels have size limits on their internal I/O buffers, which affects things like the maximum amount of data that can be sent through a pipe without blocking. Does this affect rendering terminal screens with lots of detail (a screenful of text, lots of colors, etc.)? I imagine the combined text and ANSI escape codes could amount to so much data that it doesn't fit in the pty driver's buffer, which would split a screen update into several write operations by the application and several reads by the terminal emulator. If the terminal emulator were eager to display the results of each read before processing the next, this would cause the display to flicker until the final read in a batch has been processed.

• Do terminal emulators or pty drivers have deliberate timeouts for batch processing so that their behavior more closely mimics hardware terminals, feels more natural, or addresses some other concern that was deemed more important than display speed?

Recently there has been some effort to make new terminal emulators that render faster (e.g. by pre-rendering fonts into OpenGL textures in video memory). But these efforts only seem to hasten the rendering of a character cell grid onto a screen bitmap once the grid has been calculated.

There seems to be something else going on that makes this stuff fundamentally slow even on a very fast computer. Think about it: if the terminal emulator processes all the ANSI codes to obtain a character cell grid before rendering anything into a screen bitmap, then it doesn't matter how slow the character-grid-to-bitmap rendering routines are – there should be no flicker (at least not the kind of flicker that clearly seems to correspond to cursor movement on a hardware terminal, which is what we often see). Even if the terminal emulator took a whole second to draw any given character cell grid on the screen, we would simply get a second of inactivity, not a second of flicker.

A similar issue is that the Unix clear and reset commands are incredibly slow for what they do (from a GUI user's perspective, they don't do anything more complex than redraw a bitmap). Perhaps for related reasons.