I'm a bit lucky here in that the number of characters on the screen at any given time is bounded, so at max we have maybe 50 spans, which should not be a big de

I'm a bit lucky here in that the number of characters on the screen at any given time is bounded, so at max we have maybe 50 spans, which should not be a big deal. I'm not sure how it would scale. In general, if you employ windowing all UI rendering issues are bounded by the number of items visible at a time which can let you get away with a lot of craziness, but if the number of items on the screen is as much as the number of characters on the screen... that could end up being a bit much. I know a lot of things like that end up using shaders to render text, but that is a lot of added complexity.