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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's a good point. It would be neat to have a way to draw full GUIs in the terminal without having to context-switch.

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I think the world missed an opportunity around about the '90s. Instead of evolving, command lines stagnated and got sidelined by terrible GUIs that are only now evolving to get out of people's way.

We should have developed command lines with graphics and hypertext. Thus you could do `ls` and double-click on one of the resulting files to open it. Browse the web with wget.

Of course users don't want to learn lots of commands. But notice how Windows 7 onwards and most linux desktops have a "fuzzy search" that really is a kind of command line.

There has been many attempts, but they've universally not gotten things "right enough" to gain much traction. E.g. Mozilla's XMLTerm [1] was one such experiment.

[1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

Anyways, if i am to speculate then GUI took over because of discoverability and ease of translation. A CLI is damn hard to translate. With a GUI you change the labels, and thats it. And finding something in a menu or similar was, before programs grew into massive behemoths, simpler than trying to guess what command, for most outside the english speaking world, named in a foreign language, to give to get something done.

There are several options here, ncurses being a popular choice.

I found an example that creates a subwindow and moves it based on keyboard input:

http://www.paulgriffiths.net/program/c/srcs/curwin1src.html

By full GUIs I mean something with a full-resolution, full-color framebuffer, not just character-mode stuff.

And that works remotely? So the X protocol?

Sure, that's one option. You could also implement something like NeWS where the graphics code runs locally.

Most people would just use X or VNC today, but I agree having more graphic integration reliably available in the shell is interesting.

Apart from various experimental support for new mechanisms in various terminal apps, there are two old formats that is supported reasonably widely: ReGIS [1] and Sixel [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

The issue there is standards. How do your program talk to the kernel and hardware such that all this gets drawn? Especially in a modern multitasking environment, where no single binary, outside of the kernel, has complete control of the hardware.

We have full resolution full colour frame buffers. But instead of typing into them, we end up with grunt and poke interfaces.

FWIW, Bloomberg Terminals might be something in line with what you want.

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