Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.

I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.

A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.

> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

We all know the answer to this

TUIs are great coz they work seamlessly over shell, but there is no reason for that for editor.