I still think it leans very technical though, users would greatly prefer buttons. There's a good reason that powerpoint doesn't have one of these
https://i.imgur.com/dxXwRzD.gifv
This allows the less familiar or technical staff to do things with the app and also allows for veterans or CLI afficiandos to alias/run what they want directly from the cli.
It doesn't need much. First the text should be editable like other text on the OS, the cursor needs to be reactive ro mouse input. Second expected shortcuts should work, that means things like Ctrl+A to select all, Home to go to start of line, Ctrl+C for copy, Escape to cancel things, etc.
I know there are reasons to everything and I am used to terminal shortcuts as well, but there is literally no reasons why we can't ensure they are the same there as everywhere else.
Next thing would be the startup experience. If you start a terminal the first time, it should offer you some introduction. Sure, a seasoned user like me would be annoyed by that, but if you make it so it can be ignored by the likes of us or people that set the right environment variable, cool.
Lastly, maybe it also a bit about the colors and fonts. I like bright on dark, but I can see how people who see this for the first time get flashbackanof every hacker scene they ever saw in any movie. And the subtext there always was: "You only understand this if you sacrifice all your social life". Imagine how a terminal would look like if it was made for kids and how that would make people judge their own ability to get this instead.
I think a lot of the reason why terminals still look the way the do (apart from the fact it just works), is gatekeeping. Some nerds like that this is arcane, secret knowledge that looks as if it is hard to aquire. They don't like others to understand unless those others are also nerds.
(if you can make an unfriendly but more consistent terminal, that'd also be a worthwhile improvement, just not for your target audience)
If you're willing to lead the horse to water, we'd be able to see if it drinks.
I have been thinking a lot about providing a shell-like experience as a quick way to make advanced functionality available in an app, without having to build fully fledged GUIs for them, but I’m not sure whether that would work. Clearly, discoverability and text input are the key issues, but I don’t know if alleviating those is sufficient to make the interface actually interesting and useful.