I feel like overflow as an error-handling thing would be reasonable to handle in a variety of ways; however, if you start trying to offer HTML-like word wrap in

I feel like overflow as an error-handling thing would be reasonable to handle in a variety of ways; however, if you start trying to offer HTML-like word wrap inside tables, you start experiencing difficult optimization problems. I think it's probably better to let applications split paragraphs into lines based on some kind of heuristic, embedding the newlines into the text that the terminal has to handle. A lot of things would benefit from being able to output tab-separated output. (I feel like https://okmij.org/ftp/papers/DreamOSPaper.html https://okmij.org/ftp/papers/DreamOSPaper.html used to have screenshots?) Things like pstree want a "dot leader" approach, where you tag a cell (with an escape sequence?) as being padded out to the column width not with whitespace but with more copies of its contents. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/alglayout.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/alglayout.py I'm doing it with the ~ operator, but that's just nesting stacks of hboxes and vboxes for layout and outputting just fixed-width ASCII, not using full-fledged tables and outputting pixels. (There's an OCaml version of that program if that would be more readable; I haven't written a Ruby version.)