I agree but to the parent's point, there is still something non-native about these terminal apps that essentially draw a full blown GUI and build a custom appli

I agree but to the parent's point, there is still something non-native about these terminal apps that essentially draw a full blown GUI and build a custom application in there. What I want is terminal apps that seamlessly integrate with all the standard conventions of the terminal. Your example of history is a great one. Another is, wherever possible enabling things like vi-style navigation, minimal need to move your hands off the home row, seamless integration with command line tools (implementing a search function - don't! let me pipe it through my own one, eg: grep). As soon as I have to hit function keys, manually navigate to control UI elements etc. it's just a really bad recreation of what we already have in the browser.