I've done a bit of experimentation on this and it seems that the more cells there are in the embedded terminal, the slower it redraws. This seems like it's probably an issue in the upstream emulator library rather than aerc, though I can't say for certain.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020, at 13:16, ~emersion wrote:

Maybe the wire format should just be IRC itself.

Using IRC would create a nice opportunity to reuse the listener side for receiving management commands via a magic user similar to the controlpanel module in znc.