It was quite reasonable 25-odd years ago - which, until recently, was probably about when anybody last touched the code... (To make line-based copying and past

It was quite reasonable 25-odd years ago - which, until recently, was probably about when anybody last touched the code... (To make line-based copying and pasting work I would imagine they had to do some quite invasive surgery at some point... the idea that the window is backed by a screen buffer that's a fixed-size grid of (attribute,character) pairs is exposed quite openly in the API.)