I finally committed to doing some user-interface and productivity work on my 9front install by forking to store my modifications on a branch, and I'm a) so glad I did and b) so glad I waited until I'd spent enough time away from the unix terminal paradigm.
My commits are all on top right now because I've not pulled upstream recently: https://git.sr.ht/~grimmware/9front/log
I need to write a top level note of what all my patches actually are (and to credit people for the patch sets that I pulled in - the theming code is from https://ftrv.se), but essentially I've changed the default terminal keyboard navigation to allow not just selection, but selection growth and shrinking from both ends.
You can also use keybindings to send a selection to the end of input (good for building commands and combining with custom history scripts for repeating actions), move the mouse to the text selection, and boring things like copy and paste.
I mean the first commit is unfortunately removing some pretty offensive quotes from Terry Davis (who was the author of TempleOS whose racist, ablest and homophobic screeds and also whose death were a product of his severe mental illness). I'll be seeing if upstream 9front is willing to accept that particular patch because I don't think there's much value in being a platform for that speech.
As for my fork, I sure as shit don't want to host it.
I think next I'll be reproducing the code for samterm to get similar keyboard-based navigation and selection.
I think I might also put together a short video of how it works and what the rationale is.
I'm particularly proud that it doesn't copy any common UI paradigm that I'm particularly aware of and takes the intent of the rio terminal and just makes it more accessible for a keyboard-focused user.
