Why are there so many new terminal multiplexers?
peterp.orgWhy are we still using typewriter emulators in 2026?
personally?
1: It's easier and faster to use IFF you spend the time to learn it.
2: Information density. It actually uses the whole screen, and isn't designed around applying (and taking to the extreme, which is the style at this time) the concept of negative space one learns in design school.
If I open youtube's homepage in a maximized window on a 1080p screen I see: two video thumbnails in row 1, with the right third of the row just blank, and half of row 2, containing 5 short video thumbnails (the utterly useless ones), the lower third of which is offscreen. Insane
That’s answering why use a text based UI.
GP is asking why we’re stuck with TTYs (the typewriter interface) as the mechanism for applications to draw the text based UIs.
the limitations of an "emulated typewriter" keeps things from becoming too complicated. And also allows you to control it using just "echo". It has its warts, but I still think it's a good system.
For doing Unix terminal things before bit mapped displays became ubiquitous, sure. But in all honesty once you start GPU accelerating and implementing graphics with sixel or some other image over typewriter contraption you're off in the weeds IMO. sixel might be cute, but it was a solution from a time long ago when terminals were still a thing.
We have GPU accelerated bit-mapped displays with 3D rendering, general compute capability and gigabytes of RAM. Create a GPU accelerated canvas in a buffer, load assets like text and bitmapsinto memory and issue rendering commands like a graphics engine. This way you can render text at a 35 degree angle on top of other text on a bitmap on a freakin rotating cube. Draw whatever you want instead of trying to GPU turbocharge a typewriter cosplaying as a dot matrix printer. To me that's backwards thinking.
You can still build an all text TUI but with better text control and graphics. This can work over a 2-way pipe like TCP, websocket or whatever using RPC's.