But you can't really do information dense when you are limited to a fixed grid of monospaced character glyphs. Variable width fonts are much more information dense for example.

By "information dense," I meant in contrast to what is typical in modern GUIs: generous borders and margins between interface elements, large buttons, etc. My experience both using and writing TUIs is that, because of the extreme limitations of your tools w/r/t styling and layout, more of the screen real estate tends to be devoted to displaying data, and on whole I prefer that.

YMMV, of course, I'm just sharing my own experience and perspective.

I prefer TUIs personally, but I can't see myself use maps, or visual image editing in a TUI for example, but is vi infinitely faster than vscode for manipulating a codebase? Absolutely.

Anything that lends itself to keyboard input, piping, text manipulation and a bunch of other things are so much faster if you're equally proficient in both input modes.

What? 99% of my programs I can open more than one window by just executing the program as normal multiple times, the only ones that enforce a kind of singleton execution are things that also acts as a kind of server, one example is Everything search, but it has a "Open new Search window" for multiple windows. And that is the default, you have to explicit code in a lock/global mutex thing to block multiple instances.

vscode, electron app, no problem opening multiple windows. Geany, gtk app, no problem opening multiple windows.

Can you give an example where this doesn't work?

Anything from WhatsApp to the Settings app on macOS where I might want to, say, compare the wifi network settings for two access points.

But the point is that the developer has to build the app in a way that lets you do this.

Once again, there is no default with the tools I listed. You decide on how you want windowing to work and then build it.

At this point, show me examples of needing a mutex to "block" a multi-window default.

I don't get it. Let's say you create a game.exe, a windows application with a single window. User double clicks on game.exe icon on their desktop, and the window opens. User double clicks the icon again, and the game window opens again. If the developer want to prevent two instances of game.exe running at once, they need to actively detect and prevent this behaviour.

Just like you can start vim several times you can start gvim several times and have a few windows. This is the default behavior, and if the developer wants to change this for some reason, they need to put in some effort.

Maybe macOS is special? I'm not familiar with this platform.

Not on Mac OS, opening more than one instance is undefined behaviour. It may work, but it may also corrupt your data.

>and would be in copyright violation if they keep more copies than they bought.

They can contact the copyright holder and ask/buy a license to make multiple copies.

yes and they can ask for a pony and then a unicorn too

For what?