It's a bit wild that in 2026 we still don't have a proper CUA terminal IDE on modern unix systems.

DOS in the 90s had editors like Borland's Turbo Pascal & Turbo C, ... proper TUIs, tab management, mouse support, context menus, online help, project management, integrated debugging, the lot.

Unix got... "just use vim, bro".

@fribbledom May we figured we don't need all that fanciness in the terminal.

@fribbledom xwpe exists since 1993.

@fribbledom or anywhere else for that matter since the invention of ribbons and hamburger menus and cryptic sidebars.

Plus of course there's this: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

@Mae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

@fribbledom This is "sloppy", but https://getfresh.dev

@fribbledom Yes. Unix is having many specialized tools available that do one thing particularly well and legoing them together.

@fribbledom Dos had that because there, monolithic apps way the way to go, because the lower layer was so weak.

@konrad

You can build that as either a monolithic block or as a modular application. I'm not asking for the wheel(s) to be reinvented.

@fribbledom yeah I dont know of anything that is what you are looking for by default but we have gotten to the point where there are just plug and play nvim setups like astronvim which "just works" -- has tabs, a nice command bar, searchable help, lsp support, mouse, debugging.

I think its pretty nice, although i do find it generally slower than something like Zed anyways

@fribbledom TUI's are an accessibility nightmare. Plus DOS's 90's TUI editors looked like ass compared to the graphical environments I was used to coming from the Atari ST in the 80's.

@fribbledom Back in the day, wasn't it just vi or emacs, though?

Would love to see a fully-fledged CUA Terminal IDE on Unix/Linux.