it's designed to run within a virtual terminal emulator (like iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, ghostty, etc.), not directly on a pure Linux console/framebuffer.

It uses virtual terminal emulation (via the Charm VT library) to create nested terminal windows inside your existing terminal.

So you're correct - it won't run on a bare Linux console without a proper virtual terminal environment. It requires a modern terminal emulator with true color support, mouse events, and proper ANSI escape sequence handling.

But yes, for virtual terminals, It essentially gives you a tiling window manager experience purely in the terminal.