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A REPL like bash already is not a pure text stream, since readline is used. Zsh, even less so.

But they are just convenience features, not in my opinion the defining property. They basically work just the same without them.

Try running plain sh / ash interactively without readline, and notice how much pain it is.

But I agree that having multiple windows, etc is a whole new step; it's just a limited GUI accessible easily via SSH. Could involve sixel graphics as well.

Virtual terminal is surprisingly capable, it even has word delete feature! And shells have some nice history features which I'm sure would become even more familiar if one had to use them (as I suppose was the case a long time ago), such as !$ that expands to the last argument of previous entry.

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