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It's time to talk about my writerdeck
(veronicaexplains.net)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The answer is right there in the fist paragraph, and in more detail if you read the whole article.
The author uses kmscon, that is a usermode console with proper graphics drivers, hi res rendering, and UTF8 font support. There is no desktop environment used.
I suspect that is where the italics support is coming from. Makes me want to try it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmscon