In a C# console application for Windows, I'm am using the Windows Console API WriteConsoleOutput (via PInvoke) to write an entire buffer in a single operation to prevent flickering. This works fine.
Microsoft recommends using virtual terminal sequences to interact with the console. These sequences are great, as they offer much better output, such as colors, etc.
But, as I understand it, WriteConsoleOutput cannot be used with escape sequences (see CHAR_INFO).
My question is,
How can I use virtual terminal sequences to write to the console flicker-free?
I'd like to update different parts of the screen with different characters and colors. Doing this by chaining a lot of Console.Write() and Console.SetCursorPosition will cause a lot of flickering and reduce framerate.
What is the virtual terminal equivalent of writing an entire buffer?
I hate to answer my own question, but I have found a solution after a couple of days' experimenting.
The answer to this question:
What is the virtual terminal equivalent of writing an entire buffer?
There is none. Not exactly. I haven't found anything similar to WriteConsoleOutput, which renders a pre-populated buffer of an arbitrary size.
However, virtual terminals have the concept of alternate screen buffers, which can be created by CreateConsoleScreenBuffer and switched with SetConsoleActiveScreenBuffer.
Using that, I came up with a solution for my first question:
How can I use virtual terminal sequences to write to the console flicker-free?
Basically, what I do is I create a new buffer and then use WriteConsole to write VT escape sequences to the back buffer before I switch the buffers.
The thing I don't like about this solution is the call to WriteConsole. There will be a lot of them (writing characters/sequences one by one), or there will be few of them when writing long pre-escaped strings.
In order to test flickering, I created a single string with 120 x 30 characters, with each character given a 256-color. This produced a string of over 41'000 characters, which was used as input to WriteConsole.
This actually seems to work pretty well!
This is the best solution I have found so far. If you find a better one, please write your own answer here!