From an idealistic point of view I agree, but both ASCII and ANSI escape codes predate the kind of terminal UIs we are discussing here and thus things just orga

From an idealistic point of view I agree, but both ASCII and ANSI escape codes predate the kind of terminal UIs we are discussing here and thus things just organically evolved that way. You only have to look at the mess that is applications built on top of Electron using HTML, CSS, JS transpilers etc to see how we’ve not learned our lesson about evolved technologies becoming de facto. There’s plenty wrong with writing UIs in the terminal due to the age of their design but in regards to the argument raised by the GP, detecting the escape key is one of the lesser painful anti-patterns in that area and thus a great many tools do use the escape key.