I actually am exploring exactly this. Ironically from the perspective of someone that was trying to leave the Terminal.

How i got here i find kinda interesting. Originally i was trying to leave the terminal. Using GPUI/etc frameworks. I kept running into the terminal though, because no matter how nice the UI is - the terminal still needs to work excellently.

Eventually i decided to try an abomination. To use a custom terminal which, not unlike Kitty images, allows generic apps to pass escape codes to control the UI components. Where the UI components have no restriction on "dumb terminals". So my text editor is a two part app, an editor and a tty to render the actual custom UI APC codes.

This paved the way for true smooth scrolling from within a terminal editor, as the editor effectively paginates but the tty scrolls within the buffered pages. It allows for different UI components to mix fonts and font sizes, eg popup docs being a different size than the other text, and .. well, anything i suppose.

I have to say it's working excellently and is slowly becoming my daily driver. I won't link it though, it's a fully vibe coded and even claude designed horror.

I'm surprised i've not seen more of this in the past to be honest.