meh. TTY programming was hard in the 90's, and then it was done. If you find it hard now, you're probably still just learning all about it. Its an old, well and truly solved problem. The slayers of yesterdays TTY dragons are todays WebSocket hackers, I surmise.
Still, I think the TTY - and UARTS in general - have a lot of utility in this day and age, warty dragons and all. I've got a terminal server in my lab just for the case of wiring up the small, light, cheap, efficient embedded systems which still depend on the dragons to deliver the fire. Nothing quite like having a functional 9600-baud term you can tap into with an Oscilloscope and work out what the bits mean .. try doing that with a JSON-based interface. ;)
Further, there are still things for which there is not a right way to do it. If you look at the man page for "unbuffer" (part of expect), there's a "CAVEATS" section that describes a bug... that can't be fixed while PTYs are in their current state. I wouldn't call it "well and truly solved".
Still, I think the TTY - and UARTS in general - have a lot of utility in this day and age, warty dragons and all. I've got a terminal server in my lab just for the case of wiring up the small, light, cheap, efficient embedded systems which still depend on the dragons to deliver the fire. Nothing quite like having a functional 9600-baud term you can tap into with an Oscilloscope and work out what the bits mean .. try doing that with a JSON-based interface. ;)