I really wish that 1% of the sustained effort that is currently being devoted to building terminal emulators and TUI applications was collectively redirected at researching a better future to fill this niche.
Terminal emulators and TUI applications belong with the DMG Gameboys, Commodore 64's, and DOSBoxes: as a historical curiosity and something for the enthusiasts to enjoy after hours. But we've come to rely on them almost to the point where they're being fetishised; most of us using this technology nowadays aren't even questioning its negative impact.
We need better command line / REPL environments. We need better cross-platform GUI toolkits. We need better remote access. And we need to let go of the TV teletype.
It's X11/systemd/ipv4 problem. People agreeing there is a problem doesn't mean that any single solution will be accepted. With terminals you have a system that works with anything from HPC-s to serial devices. An alternative would probably need to drop support for something, meaning congratulations: The number of standards increased by 1 - probably 2 by the time that people unsupported by the modern alternative decide that they too would like something new.
The current effort can at least be pointed towards something.
I don't think we need a new standard (the web is already a standard, and PWAs/Electron build on top of it), we simply need better incentives/trade-offs for people who would like to write portable software, but are stuck between TUI and a hard place.
I'm weirdly attracted to Tk (with Tcl or Tkinter). It's not shiny, but it's very practical.
I think you're both right in that we need standards, and we'll get them but with fractures, but at the same time we could try harder to reduce the incidence of fractures. Because at the end of the day this is all a social problem, and social problems can only be fixed by the society coming together.
Yes, I've been following it for a while - it's exactly the kind of research that I had on my mind. I don't necessarily agree with some of the design choices (I don't think we need a middle layer underneath VT100 emulation to make TUI apps, TUI is IMHO just terrible as a concept to begin with), but SHMIF has the mark of a battle-tested protocol, and many other concepts are very interesting.
They treat CLIs as a subclass of TUIs. Underneath it all it is just a high-level decoupling API to replace ncurses/readline/.... The output becomes a window with a packed-text buffer format. You can mix and match graphical windows with TUI(CLI) ones in the same client.
Terminal emulators and TUI applications belong with the DMG Gameboys, Commodore 64's, and DOSBoxes: as a historical curiosity and something for the enthusiasts to enjoy after hours. But we've come to rely on them almost to the point where they're being fetishised; most of us using this technology nowadays aren't even questioning its negative impact.
We need better command line / REPL environments. We need better cross-platform GUI toolkits. We need better remote access. And we need to let go of the TV teletype.