I'm a big fan of this as a principle, but I feel that the terminals / command lines haven't really evolved much beyond a VT102; the biggest widespread innovatio

I'm a big fan of this as a principle, but I feel that the terminals / command lines haven't really evolved much beyond a VT102; the biggest widespread innovation probably being the ability to resize a window. Let's agree that by "command line", I mean an actual command line: one program piping data into another. If you're using the terminal to run character grid programs, like lynx, vi, mc, top, mutt, etc, it's strictly inferior to running an equivalent X11 program of similarly minimalist UI design: the X11 protocol is already serialised, but with a terminal, you can barely get as far as rendering a basic picture (sixels exist, but barely anything supports them). The Macintosh did more in 1984, and the terminals never caught up. The terminal emulator in Emacs is actually an interesting take: it pretends to be dumber than it is, but in return you can e.g. move your cursor freely around the terminal output; copy and paste; select, edit & rerun a command. Swift Playgrounds allow you to rerun a script, but starting from the line you've last edited; you also get a preview of what each variable is holding - it feels like a fusion of the "command-response" style, and writing code in an editor. These things are really cool, this is the kind of innovation that the command line could use. For most day to day work though, you're likely fooling yourself by running mutt and vi - or you can prove me wrong and use MH[1] and ed, but let's agree it gets counterproductive real fast. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System