[ordu]

I love terminal because it is universal tool. I use urxvt in X-session, or emacs-shell sometimes. I can use it over ssh. I have kernel console for times when Xorg is broken. It is great. Great for user and for programmer too. As programmer I need not to fo any special tricks for my program was able to work with any terminal. It just works. All I need is printf, or something like. It is much simplier than any GUI toolkit use. Moreover, I can write programs for microcontrollers and communicate with them through serial line. Terminal is universal tool.

But this fun ends quickly if I need more than just output text sequentially. I would have nothing wrong with an idea of esc-sequences, if those sequences were standartized. But esc-sequences is not the full story -- line disciplines, complex states of terminal, heaps of historical garbage. There is ncurses, it can hide a lot of complexity but not all. And I do not like ncurses, maybe due to unhided complexity.

If I had to build terminal from scratch... At first I would state one curious fact: if decades ago terminal was extremly dumb device connected to a relatively powerful computer, now the reverse is the case: terminal runs on a relatively powerful hardware while a program working with a terminal can be run on a microcontroller with 2Kb RAM. So I see no reason to allow a terminal to be a dumb-terminal. A terminal could be pretty smart now. At least it can describe his capabilities in a universal format, for client doesn't have to consult with terminfo database, trying to guess what this terminal can do and what it cannot do.

And the second is to define clear APIs. Every time I try to do something with a terminal I need to spend a couple of days reading texts just to remind myself what the hell a terminal is.

[terminal-survey]

> At first I would state one curious fact: [...]

That part is so nicely said I might just steal it for our manifesto. :)