The biggest problems with terminals are:
- some terminals support escape sequences that can do bad stuff (like when you accidentaly 'cat' a binary file
- keyboard support is severly limited, especially regarding the Esc key and the modifiers.
People underestimate this. But you are very right.
I'll give a small story from my distant past:
I went to a college with Sun IPCs and IPXs. It turns out, if you make the terminal beep on one, it is the HIGHEST priority thing the machine can do as far as we could tell. So when someone sent someone else, 2 megs of ^Gs via some mechanism usable in the 1990's, and recipient is sitting in the middle of a cathedral computing center. The machine literally will beep, and beep, and you can't stop it.
That is a lot of bleeping, beeping. They had to power the poor machine off. Since I've used visual bell on every terminal program I use. Since I've turned on Virtual Bell in every terminal emulator, and I don't trust much on a terminal.
May a terminal emulator author read my cautionary tale. (Before you ask: No I was not the user involved.)
