the limitations of an "emulated typewriter" keeps things from becoming too complicated. And also allows you to control it using just "echo". It has its warts, but I still think it's a good system.
For doing Unix terminal things before bit mapped displays became ubiquitous, sure. But in all honesty once you start GPU accelerating and implementing graphics with sixel or some other image over typewriter contraption you're off in the weeds IMO. sixel might be cute, but it was a solution from a time long ago when terminals were still a thing.
We have GPU accelerated bit-mapped displays with 3D rendering, general compute capability and gigabytes of RAM. Create a GPU accelerated canvas in a buffer, load assets like text and bitmapsinto memory and issue rendering commands like a graphics engine. This way you can render text at a 35 degree angle on top of other text on a bitmap on a freakin rotating cube. Draw whatever you want instead of trying to GPU turbocharge a typewriter cosplaying as a dot matrix printer. To me that's backwards thinking.
You can still build an all text TUI but with better text control and graphics. This can work over a 2-way pipe like TCP, websocket or whatever using RPC's.
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That’s answering why use a text based UI.
GP is asking why we’re stuck with TTYs (the typewriter interface) as the mechanism for applications to draw the text based UIs.
the limitations of an "emulated typewriter" keeps things from becoming too complicated. And also allows you to control it using just "echo". It has its warts, but I still think it's a good system.
For doing Unix terminal things before bit mapped displays became ubiquitous, sure. But in all honesty once you start GPU accelerating and implementing graphics with sixel or some other image over typewriter contraption you're off in the weeds IMO. sixel might be cute, but it was a solution from a time long ago when terminals were still a thing.
We have GPU accelerated bit-mapped displays with 3D rendering, general compute capability and gigabytes of RAM. Create a GPU accelerated canvas in a buffer, load assets like text and bitmapsinto memory and issue rendering commands like a graphics engine. This way you can render text at a 35 degree angle on top of other text on a bitmap on a freakin rotating cube. Draw whatever you want instead of trying to GPU turbocharge a typewriter cosplaying as a dot matrix printer. To me that's backwards thinking.
You can still build an all text TUI but with better text control and graphics. This can work over a 2-way pipe like TCP, websocket or whatever using RPC's.
the kitty graphics protocol supports graphics via a pipe too afaik. You're describing x11 all over again.