alt Hacker NewsThis is a limitation of UNIX terminals, in other platforms not tied to a no longer existing tty interface, this isn't an issue.
Unfortunely, given that we are stuck with UNIX derived OSes, this is indeed a possible issue.
However I would argue, for fancy stuff there is the GUI right there.
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Unix downvoters should have a look on 9front (the most featureful/supported plan9 fork out there) in order to realize that you can follow the Unix philosophy (even more than OpenBSD itself) tossing the VT100 emulators to the legacy 'vt' emulator if you want somehow use ancient software (or SSH) while setting actual graphical windows with the shell running inside with no terminals at all. No more damn control codes messing up everything. No more linebreaks. You can cut down your text with the mouse from day one. Even under Sam, which is something like a graphical Ed crossed with Notepad and much more powerful expressions than Ex/Vi ones.
I don't know any GUI that beats tmux work portability.
Of course everything depends on exact nature of the work, but personally I would gladly leave text based interfaces behind, it's just that there's nothing better.