Why should we have graphics in the termal? Use the GUI whenever you need to do these things.
> Or, if I mouseover a filename, get a preview? ...I can't type "view lolcat.png"
Most GUIs don't even do this. However, on OS X with iTerm you already can cmd-click the filename to open the file. Or use the Finder's QuickLook utility from the command line: qlmanage -p "$@" >& /dev/null &
Basically I see no need to merge the two. They operate perfectly well together and compliment each other. To extend the functionality you could simply write shell scripts which generate custom HTML and send it to a browser (or quicklook in the case of OS X).
Furthermore, a lot of these suggestions are already implemented in ipython notebooks, which is a REPL with graphical capabilities.
qlmanage -p is cool. I tend to just use "open" personally, as in open . to see the current folder or open lolcat.png to view a file in the default editor. On Windows you can use explorer.exe to do similar things. I do, however, wish terminal had better GUI for history, scrollback bookmarks, note taking, etc. Especially if I've a 4K display with so many pixels, it's criminal to not use a few of them more effectively.
> Or, if I mouseover a filename, get a preview? ...I can't type "view lolcat.png"
Most GUIs don't even do this. However, on OS X with iTerm you already can cmd-click the filename to open the file. Or use the Finder's QuickLook utility from the command line: qlmanage -p "$@" >& /dev/null &
Basically I see no need to merge the two. They operate perfectly well together and compliment each other. To extend the functionality you could simply write shell scripts which generate custom HTML and send it to a browser (or quicklook in the case of OS X).
Furthermore, a lot of these suggestions are already implemented in ipython notebooks, which is a REPL with graphical capabilities.