This seems trivially false to you because you don't rise above the trivial, but also forget about similar trivial fails in TUIs.

> They could be garbage in every other way, but at least they have that

Not really, they could also not implement keyboard input for some interactions and only react to mouse. You could have a click-to-open-url in your terminal without a keyboard fallback setup. Of course, you could set it up, but that would be "polish if you put in the effort" There is no limit to garbage.

> Also once your workflow is increasingly keyboard based (like when using a tiled window manager),

Exactly, for example, you've set your Windows key to be reponsible for all window-based movements, so you have it move/resize app windows and want to have the same key help you move/resize "inner windows/panes/columns" in a TUI app. Well, tough luck, the terminal doesn't even recognize this modifier!

Again, "as polish if you put in the effort" you can achieve anything via some external remapping to supported keys, but "otherwise" you don't have keybindings, and don't even have generalized fallback common (though not universal, again, there is no limit to garbage) to GUIs.

Or you'd be unable to bind some key combo because in a terminal that key combo is equivalent to regular typing and you need to timeout to differentiate between the two, so a permanent friction.

> tab is swallowed by an input so you can't even tab past a component

Of course you can, use your keyboard to move the mouse pointer and click outside of the input field. All pure organic keyboard-based interaction! "They could be garbage", but at lest you have that keyboard-based option (yes, only "polish/put in effort")

I've used some pretty bad ncurses apps that barely have keybindings, like oterm.

I'd probably put them in a third, discarded, mutant category where they are mouse-first applications that run in the terminal. Thus like GUIs, keyboard-support is bolted on.

So a better distinction here is mouse-first vs keyboard-first, but I think "TUI vs GUI" is close enough to that and it kinda stands in for that distinction in most cases.

Vim, tmux, and weechat would be examples of keyboard-first TUIs where mouse support is bolted on as polish, but never required.

Where you lose me is that every example you can think of where a bad TUI might not perfectly mesh into a keyboard-only workflow, the GUI counterparts to that example is much worse. So we would just agree that it's a bad TUI rather than anyone going "you're right, the average GUI is much better if keyboard-driven control is my priority".

I don't understand some of your examples though. Your super key is always at a global level that you wouldn't expect apps to read, that's the point. And using timeouts to handle keybinding collisions or something? Dunno what that looks like nor why you would do it. The examples are like if I said GUIs suck because it's a dreadful experience if you insist on using your mouse upside down.

> So a better distinction here is mouse-first vs keyboard-first, but I think "TUI vs GUI" is close enough to that and it kinda stands in for that distinction in most cases.

It's indeed a better distinction, but no, TUI vs GUI is nowhere close, specifically for your explicitly mentioned use case of "workflow is increasingly keyboard based" because that's exactly where GUI shines as it has much fewer fundamental limitations in keyboard handling.

> than anyone going "you're right, the average GUI

That's your strawman framing, why would I care about "the average"? It's not a limit for anyone, one can always choose a better-than-average app. My point is that at the top there is no comparison because TUIs offer nothing and have much bigger fundamental limitations. So of course with the wrong framing you can find worse examples.

> And using timeouts to handle keybinding collisions or something? Dunno what that looks like nor why you would do it.

Terminals send Esc for Alt-X combos, so to differentiate those combos from a single Escape press you need to track timers (if no extra key signal, then it's Esc, if another key signal, then it's a combo). And Esc is one of the most used keys in e.g. Vim

> Your super key is always at a global level that you wouldn't expect apps to read, that's the point.

Of course I would! What I wouldn't expect is for the app to override any global OS function bound to that key, but I would definitely expect to be able to not waste a whole thumb-conveniently located modifier just because

That's very close to my point - you're used to some trivial keyboard workflow, so wasting the whole modifier is just fine, you can't even comprehend why someone wouldn't want that, it's like a mouse upside down!