> a locked down GUI that is efficient to use and designed to display the data that the commandline tools produce [...]
You can have all that. There are various data presentation tools out there (one I can think of right now is Streamlit as I tried it out a few months ago, but I'm not really a data person, Python is just my primary language). For a more general GUI framework that's pretty easy to use and still full of features without tying anything you can look at Flet[0]. Heck Jupyter too is built specifically for processing and presenting data, and can keep things as separate or combine as much as you need.
There are many solutions out there that work really well already, particularly in the Python ecosystem. The all-or-nothing is mainly an ecosystem issue IMO, as web devs don't do much data processing that isn't accompanied by immediate presentation; the web browser is primarily a presentation engine after all.
Don't look to TUIs for good presentation as the terminal just isn't the place for fancy views. It's designed strictly for organizing and displaying - preferably streaming - text, not graphics. Also think of it as a relic from the old days when there were only text displays, modernized in many ways but still bound to those roots. Trying to make it behave like a graphics display is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, unless the particular terminal has that support specifically implemented.
Sounds like you'll more likely than not be crafting that terminal yourself; I'm unaware of any that goes the lengths you seem to desire. But that's actually not that big a deal nowadays given the quality of LLM agents.
there are a few projects with interesting ideas already, warp terminal, which was recently released as FOSS is one, ttyphoon is another. both are not yet where i would want them to be in terms of data display, but they show that reinventing the terminal is possible and hopefully these ideas will get more mindshare
I honestly don't get the deal with Warp. Ttyphoon does look interesting, but it's at least 3 years old and still alpha; doesn't inspire much confidence to be used as anything more than a toy. But then again I've been using Horizon[0] since its debut here, despite encountering some alpha edges. Made a few changes, and now working on a port of it to Python.
But again generally I really don't see these projects going the "full" distance as the processing to presentation pipeline is already generally solved.
ttyphoon is mostly the work of a single person, who is also working on the murex shell. some projects take longer to gain traction. i am mainly interested in the ideas being explored, and hope that more projects pick them up. i haven't yet had a chance to try it myself.
i also didn't try warp yet. it just came out as FOSS and i am waiting for them to implement the option to disable the AI functions which they promised. what i like about warp is that it treats the output of each command as a separate entity that i can work with. a lot of power comes from that. also the separation of commandline and output if i saw that right. wave is another terminal that does that.
i'd like to take that idea even further. having separate output boxes means that each box can be used differently. i could for example run an interactive program in a box, such as an editor, or a filemanager. even a graphical one. heck, even a browser view. so basically, can treat each box as its own window without the clutter of tabs or windows that i would get otherwise. the potential of this interface is massive.
You can have all that. There are various data presentation tools out there (one I can think of right now is Streamlit as I tried it out a few months ago, but I'm not really a data person, Python is just my primary language). For a more general GUI framework that's pretty easy to use and still full of features without tying anything you can look at Flet[0]. Heck Jupyter too is built specifically for processing and presenting data, and can keep things as separate or combine as much as you need.
There are many solutions out there that work really well already, particularly in the Python ecosystem. The all-or-nothing is mainly an ecosystem issue IMO, as web devs don't do much data processing that isn't accompanied by immediate presentation; the web browser is primarily a presentation engine after all.
Don't look to TUIs for good presentation as the terminal just isn't the place for fancy views. It's designed strictly for organizing and displaying - preferably streaming - text, not graphics. Also think of it as a relic from the old days when there were only text displays, modernized in many ways but still bound to those roots. Trying to make it behave like a graphics display is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, unless the particular terminal has that support specifically implemented.
[0] https://flet.dev/