But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?
Character based interfaces are just nice, IMHO. The Borland IDE was the pinnacle of dev interfaces IMHO. It updated to have modern language server support etc would be my dream dev environment. It would be cool to see how far a compliant web browser could be taken in text mode. It's really sad that most terminals don't have proper image support, btw.
> but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks
Have you used a terminal in the last 5 years? We got graphics and everything now[0]
> huge amount of overhead
A... terminal... with... large overhead? Surely you're joking. Have you met any gui app? Microsoft word takes a few gigs. Have you seen electron apps like Spotify or slack? My fucking mail client takes over half a gig and neomutt takes almost nothing.
Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities
> actual hardware acceleration?
Hardware acceleration has existed for years...
Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.
Use SSH’s dynamic proxy mode (-D) so you have the full browser running locally and only the network traffic running over SSH.
This is enormously better for UI response time and things like compressed files: you only transfer the compressed text, image, audio, or video files rather than the decoded form which can be an order of magnitude larger.
