Hi shockone,<p>A new terminal&#x2F;shell is a very hard sell, as I know from my own experience.  Six years ago I wrote my own terminal&#x2F;shell combination ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.tcl.tk&#x2F;23446" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.tcl.tk&#x2F;23446</a> ).  It works well enough that I&#x27;ve been using it myself full-time at work ever since, but although a few other people have tried it, no-one else ever adopted it.  My own attempt is implemented in Tcl&#x2F;Tk, an older but much lighter-weight framework (it has no problem with cat-ing a 50MB file).<p>I combined the functions of shell and terminal because I found the shell&#x2F;terminal split made some of the functionality I wanted difficult or impossible. One example is that I colour text written to stderr in red - standard shells mix stderr and stdout together before the terminal even sees them.<p>I decided early on that I would not support terminal escape sequences.  I set the TERM environment variable to &quot;dumb&quot; which tells well-behaved programs not to use escape sequences.  So you can&#x27;t run vi&#x2F;vim in one of my windows, but I always use gvim so I don&#x27;t find this a problem.<p>Similarly after some experimentation I decided not to use ptys as they created as many problems as they solved.  So programs which change behaviour based on whether they are connected to a terminal behave as if running from a script.  Eg. running &quot;man command&quot; lists the whole man page rather than trying to page it - but this is what I want since one can page up&#x2F;down in the shell anyway.<p>However it seems that people who use a terminal get very attached to its idiosyncracies and will reject anything even slightly different.  Since it&#x27;s very difficult to make any real improvements without introducing incompatibilies, attempts at improving the terminal&#x2F;shell user experience rarely catch on.  In contrast, a few other tools I have implemented using the same technology have been adopted by a worthwhile user community at work.  I think the difference is that they are used for more specialised tasks and don&#x27;t require the user to change their everyday workflow.<p>Anyway, good luck with your endeavour!