A fundamental and I think obvious problem with the command line is that it usually fails to graphically split up different kinds of data. I dare say that since we often use command lines from a GUI terminal, we could leverage that and do better. (Not meant to break regular plain old inline raw text terminals, just to do better when the possibility exists.)

The rule of silence means now I am sitting here wondering if my "npm install -g whatever" will ever actually finish. There's no progress indicator. And if I ^C it and restart it with some argument to show progress, I have to assume/worry that it will restart the entire bloody download all over again from scratch. Complete bollocks UX. (The kicker is of course that the "progress" indicator of npm is a piece of junk.)

Similarly, when a command generates a lot of output, then it can be confusing/annoying/discombobulating to have to go back through the spewed text and try to figure out what is what and where and when.

A lot of this could be perhaps addressed by upgrading the entire terminal/tty/textual command line concept with the idea of separate regions "on-screen", since we are not actually ever using teletypes any more (for the most part?!).

Everything could always generate a progress indicator if it is going to take more than some minimal amount of time to complete, and the progress would go into the separate info area. In fact, perhaps all output could go into that other region.