Comment by hollerith

The software I will use to invoke your command immediately send EOF to your process's stdin. Almost all traditional Unix command do something sensible in response. "mv -i" for example, refrains from moving anything. The software I prefer to use to run your command has no provision for your command's trying to engage me in a conversation.

If I am sufficiently motivated to run your command, I might choose to re-run your command in Terminal.app. For example, I ran whatever command needed to install Command Line Tools in Terminal.app so that I could indicate my agreement to its terms and conditions by my typing "y". But your command is probably not important enough for me to bother running it in Terminal.app.

If I use your command incorrectly (e.g., if I misspell a flag), and your command tells me so, then I am willing to issue a new, corrected command line, and in fact I have the patience to try a command over and over, varying the command's arguments and the command's environment variables till I get it right.

But I no longer have the patience for things like vim or mutt or lynx -- i.e., programs that have what one might call a terminal user interface. (What about pagers? Well, I set the environment variable PAGER to cat. Similar to how Plan 9's terminal works, the software I will use to invoke your command does not automatically scroll to the bottom of the process's output: the window does not scroll unless I tell it to scroll, e.g., by hitting the page-down key.)

lynx was my primary browser for about 10 years, so it is not like I am ignorant of "full screen" terminal interfaces; I am just weary of them.