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There are advantages of putting functionality into other elements.

"The terminal" ... isn't. A TTY is a device, not an application. A terminal emulator provides access to an emulated terminal, and the beauty of screen and tmux is that you can drop these on any emulator (xterm, rxvt, konsole, gnome-terminal, xfce-terminal, etc., etc.) and have it Just Work. Or run either outside or inside (or both, if you're a masochist) an SSH session.

For another example of such modularity, there's rlwrap, a readline wrapper. If you're used to the functionality of readline integration with your shell (bash, korn, zsh, etc., etc.), and suddenly find yourself using a tool that lacks this (Oracle's client comes to mind), you have the option of wrapping the command in a utility which offers that missing functionality.

There's something to be said for modularity.

Another is that if screen, or tmux, offers a feature set you prefer, you're welcome to use whichever better suits your needs (or muscle memory).

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=rlwrap



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