I think I see your point. I've had it in the back of my head too.

Guess it's like the separation between backend and front-end. When the logic is neatly wrapped in a nice API you can potentially get a lot of reusability from that since the API can be integrated into other things with other use cases.

But a TUI probably doesn't naturally come with a separate backend. However, if a cli is built in a non TUI way it is about as flexible as a backend. Output can be streamed into pipes etc.

I can't stream k9s output into a pipe or variable but I can with kubectl.

Would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. Can TUI frameworks encourage having it both ways?