In the audio contexts I'm working in, it is a feature to have the zero crossings and errors jump out. It's less "pretty" but is as data-dense as I could get just with unicode.
> why not use color when available?
You are right, color would increase data density. In both my test context and in my debugger, color is unfortunately unavailable...
> Silence should be easy to spot, not crammed behind numbers!
The condensed 0(256) notation is ugly, it's true. However, you can't miss it, and it's information dense. This was the toughest element to design and I tried a few other styles before this, because yes, it's ugly :)
I'm often working with buffers with 256+ zeros, so zeros had to be condensed to stay legible. Simultaneously, it's often necessary to know the exact number of empty samples (they could occur at the start, middle or end of the block). A dash - for a 0 such as in [----0(256)] might have some ambiguity with a quiet part of a signal (it's important to differentiate true zeros) but your post has me thinking!...