Hm that is an interesting idea and something like it has crossed my mind before. Oil will be well-suited for that strategy since it's bash compatible.

I don't know enough about terminals to judge how feasible or easy it is, but if anyone does, please chime in here:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/908

How much of the complex processing (.e.g. selecting fields in json documents) could be done without having to pipe data back to the client (without relying on tools like jq on the server)?