It's odd to me that Emacs wasn't mentioned at all. I use it for most of my computing (email, music, file management, etc.) and it works well enough in the terminal if the Meta-key works properly, as opposed to needing to use Escape.

>Luckily, people were emailing each other from UNIX/Linux machines long before modern graphical email clients (or webmail) even existed.

I suppose this is technically true, due to the use of ''modern'' here, but I find it important to note that graphical interfaces for things such as email have existed for decades. Using terminals shouldn't be an ideal.

I find the native terminal emulation provided by the Linux kernel and OpenBSD to be lacking. There's not much of a good reason to query terminfo or termcap when every terminal you're reasonably going to use supports a superset of ECMA-48. However, I've found that even basic sequences such as SCROLL UP and SCROLL DOWN aren't supported in the native terminals. So, you get the choice between your program not working in those, making it inefficient and jittery for every terminal, or building a querying infrastructure; the first option is what I've chosen. If I'm wrong or anyone has any advice for this, I'd be interested in it.

I wouldn't be writing a terminal program in this age if the GUI facilities of modern systems were decent and I could build up my own abstraction for that, but the terminal, with all of its added faults, is at least the simpler option. It would be nice to have facilities GUIs enjoy that let me express simple concepts such as ''The interface must be at least this large.'', though.