Just suggested it in another comment, but Fish might be similar to what you desc...

Closi · on Dec 12, 2020

Fish is better, but it still only gets 1/10th of the way.

Why does terminal have to look like terminal? Like why is the 1980's ASCII telnet style the only way to do this?

The ASCII fish image on boot and fully ASCII menus only reinforces again that this isn't a modern interface, its an improved 1980's interface.

Why, for example, can autocomplete not look like this? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/intellisense

Why do progress bars when you are downloading from pip not look something like this? (still in-line with the terminal like a sparkline) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/progr...

Like surely everything doesn't have to be SO 1980's if we want shell to stay relevant.

southpawflo · on Dec 13, 2020

because then your shell will be slower than a snail.

for real though, after looking at your examples I feel that features like those would fall on your terminal emulator to bring to the table, not the shell itself.

specifically, I don't want to imagine trying to connect to a headless server during some crisis over bad wifi and have the shell think it needs to send a bunch of graphics to me.