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The beauty of Unix is its simplicity.

This made Unix so reliable. If you want to write a beautiful terminal as _addon_ I have no problem with that. But I would not accept a _replacement_ of the old fashioned terminals. Because they are so simple, they just work.

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Apparently you've never messed around with termcap. Or had to use terminals other than xterms and vt100s, or some very near clones of them.

Meanwhile, it took Unix forever before the PC's backspace key 'just worked'.

The terminal guts are unbelievably gnarly, and it's kinda surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now.

> surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now.

Because they ... just work? :-)

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