But there are no benefits, you can replicate everything in terms of user interaction identically in a more readable/better looking GUI app, so efficiency is maintained
Sure you can, but it's rare to see a GUI app built keyboard first and specifically optimized for the productivity of power users. The list of apps that do this successfully is a tiny fraction of the total.
- Excel
- 3D modeling tools
- Adobe Creative apps
- Programming IDEs
- ?
Also, if you are focused on that metric: the productivity of the power user, then in many cases adopting a more modern GUI framework will not necessarily make it easier to achieve that goal (and in some cases may make it harder).
TUI apps aren't optimized for the productivity of power users, and by the same token, replacing a GUI app with a legacy TUI framework will not necessarily make it easier while almost definitely will make it harder since some advanced productive UI patterns simply don't get implemented in TUIs - they might not've been invented/known at the time this legacy framework was created
Thus there is no innate framework benefit, only downside, so it doesn't make sense to handicap yourself tying to this legacy
why would a gui app be more readable for reading text?
The only inate difference I can think of is the ability to vary fonts and rendering based on what you are rendering more.
And that can be a nice improvement to e. g show your code at a normal size but pop a tooltip up with smaller text, or have the linter/errors tab be a smaller font.
But that's a difference and not necessarily an improvement, because having a consistent font and fixed width text can make things more predictable and faster to interact with as you don't have to scan around as much.
