Slo-o-o-w ANSI emulation

[Jim Blue]

In article <6310 at fs2.cam.nist.gov>, blue at cam.nist.gov (Jim Blue) writes:
|> 'wsh' interprets escape sequences, emulating an ANSI terminal, but
|> some of the emulations are quite slow. Especially slow is changing
|> from the normal color to the highlight color. Is there any other
|> way to draw different-colored characters in a 'wsh' window? It 
|> doesn't have to be portable, just fast. Similarly, is there any
|> way to move the cursor position other than sending the ANSI escape
|> sequence?

As a follow-up, meant to shame SGI into action (or whatever) I wrote an
editor that runs much faster on a $1000 IBM PC clone than on the 4D25, because
of the slow IRIS display in wsh. [On PC's, the standard fast display method
is to poke each character and its attribute (foreground and background color)
into the area of memory that the display board reads to refresh the screen.]
The IRIS doesn't have the "text mode" that the PC has, and doesn't work at all
the same way, but still there should be a faster way