I find it strange how most of these terminal-based AI coding agents have ended up with these attempts at making text UIs flashy. Tons of whitespace, line art, widgets, ascii art and gradients, and now apparently animations. And then what you don't get is the full suite of expected keybindings, tab completion, consistent scrollback, or even flicker-free text rendering. (At least this one seems to not be written with node.js, so I guess there's some chance that the terminal output is optimized to minimize large redraws?).
So they just don't tend to work at all like you'd expect a REPL or a CLI to work, despite having exactly the same interaction model of executing command prompts. But they also don't feel at all like fullscreen Unix TUIs normally would, whether we're talking editors or reader programs (mail readers, news readers, browsers).
Is this just all the new entrants copying Claude Code, or did this trend get started even earlier than that? (This is one of the reasons Aider is still my go-to; it looks and feels the way a REPL is supposed to.)
So they just don't tend to work at all like you'd expect a REPL or a CLI to work, despite having exactly the same interaction model of executing command prompts. But they also don't feel at all like fullscreen Unix TUIs normally would, whether we're talking editors or reader programs (mail readers, news readers, browsers).
Is this just all the new entrants copying Claude Code, or did this trend get started even earlier than that? (This is one of the reasons Aider is still my go-to; it looks and feels the way a REPL is supposed to.)