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Emacs's infamous "Ultra-hot screen management package" with its "Skull and Crossbones" warning was definitely black magic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450034

>James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of characters to draw, length of the escape codes to insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow terminals, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling (ACM SIGPLAN Notices, April 1981):

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorith...

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbon...

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                          ************** 
                          *  BEWARE!!  * 
                          ************** 

                        All ye who enter here: 
                    Most of the code in this module 
                       is twisted beyond belief! 

                           Tread carefully. 

                    If you think you understand it, 
                              You Don't, 
                            So Look Again.



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