There is no reason to and I do not know where this assumption came from.
It's very possible for a colored glyph to (intentionally!) exceed the
cell bounds, and we shouldn't be stopping this...
With a minimum contrast set, the colored glyphs that Powerline uses
would sometimes be set to white or black while the surrounding background
colors remain unchanged, breaking up contiguous colors on segments of
the Powerline.
This no longer happens with this patch as Powerline glyphs are now
special-cased and exempt from the minimum contrast adjustment.
There are scenarios where this configuration looks bad. This commit
introduces some heuristics to prevent it. Here are the heuristics:
* Extension is always enabled on alt screen.
* Extension is disabled if a row contains any default bg color. The
thinking is that in this scenario, using the default bg color looks
just fine.
* Extension is disabled if a row is marked as a prompt (using semantic
prompt sequences). The thinking here is that prompts often contain
perfect fit glyphs such as Powerline glyphs and those look bad when
extended.
This introduces some CPU cost to the extension feature but it should be
minimal and respects dirty tracking. This is unfortunate but the feature
makes many terminal scenarios look much better and the performance cost
is minimal so I believe it is worth it.
Further heuristics are likely warranted but this should be a good
starting set.
U+226A is 1-char wide according to the Unicode database but renders very
wide in many fonts. This causes it to leak outside of its grid cell. We
should scale down by x the same way we scale down by y.