You (as well as the developer) don't seem to know the difference between a terminal and a shell.
Is Hyper unable to encroach onto the product feature space of the shell due to a particularly rigid terminology?
Are the reasons for the current separation of concerns still optimal?
This is not to say that I don't mind "magic" -- I removed the `git` prefix from my git commands because I like typing `add .` rather than `git add .` all the time -- but I don't want my terminal to do it, I want my shell to.
I don't think the shell should be handling styling.
I also think the shell became less useful when modern application development began to happen on the Web. More should be done to make it easier to interact with Web applications from the command line.
When do you need to interact heavily with a webapp? Maybe I'm missing something here.
Have you read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte? Text isn't the best representation of all types of data.
Imagine also that I wanted to represent a table of data within an Excel style spreadsheet. This could be useful as it could define affordances for a user such as the ability to select rows and columns, and to sort or filter in realtime.
One issue I have with bluring the lines is you open yourself up to a huge attack vector. If I can craft the output of my shell command to get code execution within your terminal I can now do anything, anything on any system you have access to.
A terminal emulator connects your keyboard, mouse, and eyeballs to inputs/outputs of the shell.
Those are terrible explanations, I'm sorry.
While I welcome innovation I would not want my terminal to be in charge of much more than rendering text and inserting keypresses.
Yes there are some helpful things your terminal emulator can do like multiplexing, repeating input across instances, scrolling, text resizing/flowing but these are strictly UI features at no point is the terminal in charge of interacting with the underlying system, that's what the shell is for.
The example of typing a URL and having it be rendered by the terminal blurs this line, it is intercepting a command you've typed into your shell (what is essentially a system command) and being executed in the terminal, not the shell.
If they want to blur that boundary then they can crack on, it will lead to pain and anguish down the line for the users especially when they find themselves out of their comfort zone without their toys.