Make braille graph characters change less through time

[thanosz]

Checklist

• I've looked through the troubleshooting docs, the known problems list, and existing open issues for similar issues.

What operating system and version are you using?

MacOS 15.4

What architecture are you using?

arm64

What terminal(s) are you running bottom on that are experiencing the problem?

iterm2, Terminal

(Optional) What filesystem(s) are you using?

APFS

What version of bottom are you running?

0.10.2

How did you install bottom?

homebrew

Describe the issue

When the window is small you can see refresh issues when the graph updates. Attached a video that shows the graph changing in every refresh

What is the expected behaviour?

dots in the graph remain at their position while the time progresses

What is the actual behaviour?

see video, dots are flushing in every update

Screen.Recording.2025-04-09.at.09.58.30.mov

How can we reproduce this?

just shrink the window

Additional information

No response

[ClementTsang]

Hmm... off the top of my head, I don't think there's anything I can do about this, it's just a result of rendering dots using braille characters.

[thanosz]

I think you were also the original creator of gotop. Look how smoothly that runs...

Screen.Recording.2025-04-09.at.18.51.04.mov

[ClementTsang]

I think you were also the original creator of gotop.

Uh... no I'm not. You can see that...

This is also likely an issue with how ratatui renders graphs I guess 🤷

[thanosz]

Thanks for looking at it!

[ClementTsang]

Just relabelling this/renaming the issue to be more accurate as it's technically not a bug with Bottom (or a bug at all I guess), but I do want to look at this and see if it's possible to improve it.

[goyalyashpal]

gotop. Look how smoothly that runs...
- @ thanosz at #1711 (comment)

that one (from the attacted video):

• is just moving 4 characters at once: 8 braille columns.
• so, the whole graph essentially shift forwards.
• this creates an inverse relation in history shown vs update rate: resulting in either fast moving graph i.e. very limited history, or slowly (averaged out) updating graph.

whereas the bottom moves ¹/₂ chars i.e. 1 braille column, this allows to have both: fast (nuanced) refreshes, long history at the expense of some jitter every update.