I've specifically designed juggler to do exactly that.

You run it on some headless machine, and point your browser at the HTTP server it creates to see the full GUI. It uses Yjs to make that connection as efficent as possible, and it works great.

The desktop app is literally doing the same thing internally - it runs a headless server process and serves the GUI to its own window. But you can stretch that over a network and it's the same experience.

I can even connect to it via a TURN server, from my phone on a cell signal, and although it's not as snappy as running locally, it works pretty well.

But a TUI does the same thing except the client side doesn't need to have anything installed.

I'm currently using an R-studio server session running on a server half way around the world, via a gui web interface. It's fast and smooth. How on earth could that be?

if only there were a way to tunnel web servers over that very SSH connection and use a proper web UI, something HN has always been obsessed with.... oh well i guess we're stuck with a VT100! :( there's nothing we can do!

Why would I want to use a web browser when 90% of my work is in the terminal?

You mean like ssh -R? (And some magic to make host header correct, likely local hosts file)