> that makes the terminal (just text) feel like a different thing than just text to them

Terminals are a lot more than just text. They were once physical machines. Now they are software emulating those old machines. These machines, physical or virtual, are controlled via in-band signaling. In many ways they are like extremely primitive browsers. Terminals are so old they actually predate copy paste.

> it just feels like 99% of the world works and the 1% that doesn't is the terminal

They don't actually work like all the other applications. They are completely different. Terminals are extremely complex legacy devices that require special kernel support to even work. The terminal line discipline is maintained by the kernel: Linux actually processes every single incoming and outgoing byte.

Nobody really expects to be able to paste text into a video game running inside a Super Nintendo emulator. Terminals are like that. It's actually amazing that modern terminal emulators were able to provide this feature.

> We terminal nerds lose nothing if more people understand terminals, quite the opposite.

Do you want people to actually understand terminals? To me it seems like you want to change terminals into something new that just happens to be easier to understand. They wouldn't really be terminals then, would they?

Things like ^C and ^D and ^[ are literally ASCII characters. Literally. Everything is ASCII text and that includes control characters, whose input is literally enabled by the Ctrl key. These bytes cause the terminal machine and sometimes even the kernel to do interesting things such as sending an interrupt signal to the slave program, closing its file descriptor or interpreting the next bytes as code in a sort of terminal instruction set. Typing on the keyboard just sends these codes into the system which can do any number of things in response.

We simply cannot have "normal" copy/paste with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. If we did this, terminals would no longer be the simple ASCII input devices described above.

Getting people to truly understand terminals means they have to understand all this.

It may be a surprise to you, but there was nothing in your post that I didn't knew. I know all that. Just like I know the rationale behind Blender's Right-Click-select.

The terminal as a tool is shaped by its history, but that doesn't mean we have to carry that history with us forever, especially not at all cost. And I say that as someone who values history and has a self-designed physical terminal bell next to my desk. Does your terminal emulator strike a physical bell when you send BEL? If it does not than your terminal has moved on in time for one reason or another.

My point comes from the observation that the terminal is an extremely valuable tool to learn purely from an practical standpoint. Much more of that value comes from what it allows you to do, than from understanding how it works. Just like with Blender, where I as a former feelancer in VFX had no issue at all with right-click select, but occasional users would shake their fist at the heavens and complain about how bad Blender UI was with all its clever concepts. To them the historical understanding of the intricacies of the Blender UI and why "they are holding it wrong" would be utterly meaningless, what counts to them is that they can use the tool. And I agree.

Would I be happy with just any redesign of the terminal? No. But would I be okay if a good redisgn stopped it from working with physical type writers hooked up to main frames or from talking telnet to my oscilloscope? Yeah. I am okay with that. If I really need that there is probably software that still support that and I install that. I know that this is not a simple change, but it is 2025 and we can think about how things should be instead of staying with how they always have been without reason, especially if we are just talking about the defaults.