> It may be a surprise to you, but there was nothing in your post that I didn't knew. I know all that.

Well, it is a surprise to me. You claimed terminals were "just text". You said you taught this to beginners.

It is not surprising to me that those beginners would have difficulties understanding what was going on when terminals started demonstrating that they were indeed more complex than pure text.

> 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?

If we did that, they wouldn't be terminals anymore. They'd become some new, incompatible system that exists alongside the old school terminals.

I'm not even opposed to it. I love the idea of reimagining and reinventing everything. We just gotta recognize that we're building new systems. The old ones should probably be left alone.

Modern terminal emulators like kitty are working miracles out of this legacy stuff but they are still working within the confines of the system.

> 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.

The legacy of terminals is useful even today. Embedded debugging interfaces use them. I wear a modern open source watch which supports a shell through the terminal system. There's just no getting rid of it.

Even swapping Ctrl-C and Shift-Ctrl-C seems like we're just moving the inconsistencies around. Sure, copy paste is now consistent with modern interfaces but now the inputs no longer correspond directly to ASCII. Maybe we could have a vim-like modal interface where in GUI mode all the key combinations would do what we expect from modern systems while in terminal mode they would act like ASCII inputs. This fixes both inconsistencies... At the cost of being an error-prone modal interface.