That said I don’t think the point of this is to replace sed, or other unix-y tools where you’re having pipeline-oriented programs. It’s full blown apps inside of the terminal that might otherwise be in the browser or in a GUI. Something where you’re seeing things update or otherwise interacting such that you could never grab it’s out for a shell script nor would want to.. like running a REPL or top.
What I want is terminal apps that seamlessly integrate with all the standard conventions of the terminal. Your example of history is a great one. Another is, wherever possible enabling things like vi-style navigation, minimal need to move your hands off the home row, seamless integration with command line tools (implementing a search function - don't! let me pipe it through my own one, eg: grep).
As soon as I have to hit function keys, manually navigate to control UI elements etc. it's just a really bad recreation of what we already have in the browser.