[Xorlev]

I think you're being downvoted because you've claimed "That's a case of not solving the problem.", but I think that actually better describes this answer. It's clever, certainly, but misses the fact that the stack of screens was never intended to be recursively escaped and changing the form that it took was the real fix rather than rubbing some compression sauce on what was never intended to be lots of backslashes in the first place. And indeed, that's what the author did: they shipped a bandaid fix while working on a more comprehensive fix, one which didn't require RLE or a quadtree (!).

[IncRnd]

You're describing the desire to avoid protocol compression when transmitting data that grows without bound. That has nothing to do with fixing the backslashes. The problem isn't backslashes. Those are just a symptom of data that can have any length.