Whenever I use dumb terminals, I have the same feeling. I am also actively looking for a way to get a good developer experience while keeping more ownership of what gets generated with the new tools. My specific bottleneck is working in remote environments and not being able to have it , now that we have tools like Claude, Codex, and Gemini. (I find them safer to run them in virtual environments and working on them remotely is better than doing it locally.)

I also don't like the fact that each TUI application (btop, for instance) comes with its own color palette. So, a friend of mine developed a terminal (https://bateri.dev, macOS only for now, but the plan is to port it to Linux later) and yet another protocol where terminal SPAs can communicate over standard SSH (inspired by X over SSH, but we didn't like its drawbacks). The SPA itself is a set of Lua scripts that runs in a sandbox inside the terminal. The application on the host that communicates with the SPA can be implemented in any language (preferably Lua to keep it simple). With this approach, all SPAs (plugins) adhere to the user's color palette preferences. (There are more details that can share if you are interested.)

So far, to stress test it and help with devex, he has built a text editor (https://github.com/bateri/textpen) and a Docker/task monitor (https://github.com/bateri/dockerpen). I am also working on a plan document viewer that works within the terminal. We'd love some feedback if you are interested.