I know you said terminal but short of rewriting the entire stack, TTYs and all, you have to work with what you’ve got.
With murex, it does actually have a lot of intelligence built in that adapts how the output stream is displayed (eg rendering images in the terminal, “prettifying” JSON if STDOUT is a TTY, colourising STDERR red, etc.
Plus I disagree that your GP points about how JSON is handled should be a shell thing. You’re talking about data being re-encoded in different formats depending on the output. That absolutely should be a shell thing (where the logic of the pipelines are handled) with the terminal being a dumb rendering client. The last thing I want is output to be modified by the terminal leaving me scratching my head as to whether a command is running correctly or whether the terminal is displaying it weirdly.
You’re talking about data being re-encoded in different formats depending on the output.
I see now that my comment is vague in this part, but no, my idea is not about a terminal transforming the output. It’s about a presentation layer only, just like ansi escape codes (but programmable through repr-scripts). The stream remains intact, you only see it formatted. Murex does ~that, but it takes ownership of data processing by its own syntax and commands (like an IDE of CLI), while I believe that it should be done by separate tools like jq (like coreutils of CLI). It would be okay to use a dumb terminal with this system, you just would have to parse json by your mind to read output into it. See also my other comment for clarity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29456775
There’s no practical difference between jq doing it or shell builtins. Either way it is a piped process.
Murex could ship it’s coreutils as external executables like GNU but that wouldn’t be a particular efficient way of doing it. Whereas Bash, zsh, Fish etc all have builtins just the same as murex (eg if/endif, for, switch, read, echo, time, jobs, etc).
The only difference between murex and bash in that regard is that murex builtins can do more intelligent data parsing than just dumb byte streams. Of course if you wanted to use jq with murex you still can. Just as you can still use sed, awq, Perl -pie and others too.
With murex, it does actually have a lot of intelligence built in that adapts how the output stream is displayed (eg rendering images in the terminal, “prettifying” JSON if STDOUT is a TTY, colourising STDERR red, etc.
Plus I disagree that your GP points about how JSON is handled should be a shell thing. You’re talking about data being re-encoded in different formats depending on the output. That absolutely should be a shell thing (where the logic of the pipelines are handled) with the terminal being a dumb rendering client. The last thing I want is output to be modified by the terminal leaving me scratching my head as to whether a command is running correctly or whether the terminal is displaying it weirdly.