I see it is buzzword-compliant, but what is it good for?
So, I use a terminal emulators pretty extensively, and I'm tired of their dumbness. Compare any operating system from 1980 and 2015 - there is a huge difference. The same with web-sites, text editors, and pretty much any other category of software. Except terminals. The biggest achievement they made is 256 colours support. Good job!
It doesn't take a genius to understand that the limitations are caused by the text user interface. Of course, text is a great and universal tool. It's easily parsable (or not so easily, but still parsable). It can be piped, after all.
But who said we can't take the good old text and present it beautifully? Imagine you fired an sql client, wrote a select statement and received an ASCII table as an output. Wouldn't it be useful if the terminal understood that it looks like a table and converted it into an HTML table, with sorting by any column, resizing, filtering, and everything else. The same with XML, JSON and every other format: why should I type `jq` after a command that outputs JSON? Is that so hard to just detect and parse it for me?
Output formatters was the idea that made me start the development. I also plan to let users write custom formatting plugins.
But even besides that point there is a lot of room for improvement in current terminal emulators. For example, I have a git branch displayed in RPROMPT of my ZSH. It works well, but if I checkout another branch from a different place, my shell will still show the old branch, which can have certain consequences, if you rely on it.
The current feature I work on is autocompletion. I plan to parse man files and provide only what can be displayed in that place. By the way, folks from the Fish team do the same.
Unfortunately, right now Black Screen can not be used as a replacement for your favourite terminal, it has a long path to the first release.