I think there are at least two different issues here: 1) the general UX of terminal emulators. Which as the wording suggests is about emulating some severely o

I think there are at least two different issues here: 1) the general UX of terminal emulators. Which as the wording suggests is about emulating some severely obsolete, at least half a century old hardware, including weird limitations that came with those. Most modern terminal emulators work hard to undo some of that. But it is weird that we stick with these being emulators for stuff most people here would never have touched in their life because they are not at retirement age yet. I just turned 50 and I remember having some slightly less fancy terminal emulators to work with (xterm basically) on hpux, sgi, and some sun workstations we had at university in the nineties. Even then the whole notion was basically obsolete. All those came with xwindows, xterm and some basic shells and other command line tooling. 2) the general UX of cli software that you would use from a terminal. Which is a bit all over the place and generally not great. If you use something reasonably modern, the terminal environment is not completely horrible. I use iterm2 on a mac, which is pretty nice. There are a few competing products. What I like about iterm2 is that I can use cmd+c and cmd+v for copy paste so I don't have to think about having to hit the shift key just because I'm in a terminal window (like on the Gnome terminal). Also nice is that two finger scrolling works. Even when using less/bat/more/whatever. There are a few other nice things that they solved but that solves a few basic UX issues. The second issue is harder to address because it basically involves fixing a lot of tools that have been around for decades, which is just not going to go down well with those that have used those tools for a few decades. There are some nice modern replacements for some of those tools. For example, I use eza instead of ls (via an alias of course). And there are a few similar rewrites of classic cli tools that offer some nice features and performance. But mostly those aim to be drop in replacements.