The terminal is the oldest interface most of us still use daily, and somehow the one that annoys me the least.
Think about what it gets right:
It's honest. A terminal shows you exactly what it's doing. No spinners hiding a queue of network requests, no skeleton screens pretending work is happening. Text goes in, text comes out.
It's fast. Not "optimized bundle" fast. Actually fast. The feedback loop between thought and result is measured in milliseconds, and you feel it.
It's composable. history | grep deploy | wc -l is three tools that never met each other, cooperating perfectly through the world's simplest interface: lines of text. We've spent forty years inventing RPC frameworks trying to beat that, and mostly haven't.
It respects memory. Once your hands learn a command, it's yours forever. Meanwhile I couldn't tell you where any setting lives in any app I use, because they reorganize every quarter.
The aesthetic is a bonus
Yes, this site looks like a CRT from 1994. Guilty. But the phosphor glow isn't just nostalgia — it's a reminder of an era when interfaces were built around what the machine could tell you, not around what a growth team wanted you to feel.
The terminal never wanted anything from me. That might be the highest praise an interface can get.