> And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning.

Well, not being an X user I can't see anything past "the vscode terminal is so poorly implemented it cannot deal with the ansi i am throwing at it", but as a Vim user you won't catch me defending VSCode. I will say if you're looking for perfect classes of applications you won't find any, i.e. if your standard for implementing things is that no implementation of a thing can have a bug, you'll never implement anything.

>> just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these)

> I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use.

I'm just trying to get at the outlines of your argument. If this wasn't what you meant, OK then.

> One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang”

This shouldn't do anything that running `reset` can't fix. If it does, that emulator has a bug. But further, that's not really a standard or anything to do with ancient computing. I can easily send you to a page that locks up your computer with bonkers JavaScript (it's called realclearpolitics lol). Terminal escape codes don't have a monopoly on locking up your apps.

> removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born

My premise is that these people don't have computers. Also using a terminal on a device from before I was born sounds awesome (you can imagine what my YouTube recs look like haha)

> I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age.

I think about this all the time, but primarily like in the realm of like JSON vs. msgpack. There's something very cool about being able to interpret a data stream just by looking at it (more or less). But it's also wildly inefficient, 99.999999999% of the time only computers are ever looking at it, and in the CLI case the general lack of structure or standard leads to annoying extra work and pretty evil bugs.

> One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic?

There's no way I can dig it up now, but I remember reading some article about everything you'd have to go through to assuredly (more or less) print Unicode characters to a screen in C, like you're dealing with wchar_t, defining special things on Windows, making sure you have a supporting font, blah blah.

In fairness though, this is pretty easy in modern languages like Python or Go, plus I don't know how common it is for terminals to not render Unicode (if you're using a non-Unicode-aware terminal these days I'd be amazed, I mean how will npm display emojis??).

I don't know if Unicode is a good example for us to work with though. It is more computationally taxing so it works for your end, but it also extends computing to way more people so it works for my end too. A win-win doesn't really exercise the tension you and I are getting at.