Plan 9 did away with that dichotomy by making it graphical first called /dev/draw. A console device, /dev/cons, handles textual i/o and renders it to the /dev/draw device. You can bypass that and open /dev/draw and render your own text using the same library /dev/cons uses. If one needs a unix compatible virtual terminal with addressable cursor and proper copy/paste then the vt program is used. vt then opens /dev/cons and interprets shell escape sequences written by the program and pokes at the /dev/cons buffer. So the rc shell in plan 9 doesn't do escapes or colors or anything. It just reads and interprets commands from stdin and writes its output to stdout in the most simplistic manner possible. pretty much a serial console that keeps scrolling. There is no cursor.