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I don’t know how to respond to this as you seem to just think I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to use computers.

The problem with using a terminal is that control of it is distributed between a few things the user can control and the escape sequences (or just output) produced by the shell and any processes that run in it. These may end up conflicting with each other leaving your terminal in a bad state or you may just get broken output (ever tried piping pv something | ... | less?). One way to regain some control is with something like tmux but this can become unwieldy (and heaven forfend it sees a multibyte Unicode character—terminal emulators don’t really have a way to communicate with applications about how wide a character is going to be when drawn)

I think a few things get conflated because there are few text-centric or command-line user interfaces. I put it to you that it is possible to have good composable text-centric user interfaces that don’t rely on pretending to be a VT100 or an ancient single-byte-stream-with-control-sequences protocol.




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