[badsectoracula]

I think it is partly fashion (little UI is more "hackerish" after all) and partly lack of exposure (a lot of programmers nowadays who have worked on TUI applications might have little to no exposure to DOS programs of yesteryear).

It is technically possible though, as an example here is Free Pascal's text-mode IDE[0] running inside an xterm window under Linux. The IDE uses Free Vision[1], a TUI framework originally based on Borland's Turbo Vision, that is nowadays part of Free Pascal itself (though the framework uses the TP7-style "object" types for OOP instead of the Delphi-style "class" types).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/QZWt9lC.png

[1] https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision

[zozbot234]

Yeah but FPIDE is the exception that proves the rule. Why can't we have a VSCode work-alike in text mode, with LSP, tree-sitter and DAP support? That stuff is even getting added to Emacs these days, so it has a proper free-software pedigree even though it comes from M$.

[jhoechtl]

Isn't that neovim, emacs -nw and helix?

[elteto]

emacs -nw?