bperrybap:
On the graphics and speed optimization yet keeping things simple, one thing that I've also thought about doing is to make a very slimmed down "lean and mean" library that uses the CP437 font. (if you haven't seen this google it).
Ah, that font! That brings back fond memories of when I used to work with Turbo Pascal. We used to make quite nice menus with boxes, bars, double lines, tick marks, etc. And the gray boxes could be put to good use too.
Indeed there is absolutely nothing stopping you adding that in, because in the case of my library I had a "bit blit" function that copies characters in groups of 8 pixels to the screen, so each glyph in an 8x8 pixel font would simply be 8 bytes. To build that into the library would take 1024 bytes (8 * 128), which is memory you may or may not want to spare. Perhaps with a define around it?
I wonder if anyone has the CP437 with the pixels written down as bytes? That way at least it could be offered as an option, and it is tedious doing it yourself. So far most of the links I have found have shown what the font looks like, or the Unicode equivalent, but not the pixels as a group of 8 bytes.