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I find these posts annoying that say we're anchored in past tech and we must be able to do better, but never suggest how.

Please make a suggestion or two.

(NB ultimately our character handling is based on 'writing' which goes back thousands of years, not 50, and it survives well).

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I suggest learning from history. The doing better has already happened. The 1960s terminal I/O model evolved into the console I/O model during the 1980s; from firmware-mediated access to CGA, through the VIO+KBD+MOU subsystems of OS/2, to Windows NT console objects.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238350

That seems to have nothing to do with text processing, only screen addressability.

If you actually read the whole discussion to this point, you'll see that the discussion started with being constrained to the models of teleprinters, not text processing.

Structured data and tools that operate on that structure. Maybe steal a thing or two from LISP machines. I remember the one time I had to work on an AS/400 (iirc) how interesting it was that one of the fundamental building blocks were records instead of dumb files. PowerShell has interesting ideas too, but it'd need to be far more built-in and integrated to the OS to truly shine.

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