Comment by andyferris

It's definitely for that reason. It is amazingly hard to portably do something as trivial in the DOS world as recognize [Shift]+[Ins]. The terminal paradigm is very different to the console paradigm in some areas.

In the days when a Tektronix terminal was a real physical thing that one sat in front of, the TUIs that one used didn't look at all like the ones in the contemporary personal computer world. Ironically, an old Tektronix or DEC VT user transported into the future would be very at ease with what you get in the Linux-based operating system world today.

All that said, the Windows Terminal people have worked pretty hard to get even some of the obscure ECMA-48, ITU T-416, DEC VT, and XTerm stuff into Windows Terminal, so at least TUI applications writers who are prepared to write all of the bizarre hooplah to have things like recognition of [Control]+[Home] and correctly operating reverse video, actually will get them.

DOS was the golden age for TUI apps because its ultimate API was both simple and powerful: direct video memory access in text mode. So you just get a linear chunk of memory where each character on screen corresponds to two bytes: one for the glyph, one for foreground/background color (4 bits each). For input you had some BIOS helper interrupts, but then again it was easy enough to read scancodes directly (and they were standardized on PC).

So you can handle any key or key combo however you want, and you can put any characters anywhere you want without weird corner cases like autoscrolling.