I think it’s a fundamental design choice.
It’s a double edged sword for sure, but it’s important.
It allows terminals to respond very quickly because they never need to wait for an entire data structure to download before displaying information.
It’s such a simple protocol that anyone can hack on it (which is a strength and weakness)
Asking to change that, in my mind, is like asking to change how packets move across a network. It’s all byte streams that get treated as structured data higher up on the abstraction layers.
TUI frameworks like the ones from charm.sh are built atop the base protocol and provide support for structured data much like how our network stack works. That way, as you were saying, application programmers don’t need to worry too much about the underlying “wire protocol”
The issue isn’t that terminals are stream-native or that they operate on byte codes instead of characters.
The problem is lack of standardization of said codes. Which leads to a mountain of edge cases in supporting every known terminal.
That’s the cruft, not the minimal protocol
It allows terminals to respond very quickly because they never need to wait for an entire data structure to download before displaying information.
It’s such a simple protocol that anyone can hack on it (which is a strength and weakness)
Asking to change that, in my mind, is like asking to change how packets move across a network. It’s all byte streams that get treated as structured data higher up on the abstraction layers.
TUI frameworks like the ones from charm.sh are built atop the base protocol and provide support for structured data much like how our network stack works. That way, as you were saying, application programmers don’t need to worry too much about the underlying “wire protocol”
The issue isn’t that terminals are stream-native or that they operate on byte codes instead of characters.
The problem is lack of standardization of said codes. Which leads to a mountain of edge cases in supporting every known terminal. That’s the cruft, not the minimal protocol