“No! There are absolutely no parallels between the written word and the development of the internet,” you growl through gritted teeth. “And while the stone markers distributed with text in several languages including that of the common people and placed in gathering areas did provide news to the people, it only carried the news the royals wanted them to now about,” you finish triumphantly, not realizing that proves the point being made.
Not OP. Used Linux since the late 90s. My daily driver is NixOS. GUI here is synonymous with TUI.
I like the GUI because I can see what options the tool can execute in this state. I don’t have to pass
--help
togrep
or keep several man page sections open. The machine knows what it’s capable of and I direct it.With CLIs I feel like I’m always relearning tools. Even something as straightforward as ‘enable a flag’ has different syntax. Is it
-flag
?--flag
?--enable-flag
? Oh look, a checkbox.Not to say that I think a window environment is best for all things. When using an IDE, I have the terminal open constantly. Programmers are as bad at visual interfaces as they are module interfaces. If no UX designer was involved in displaying complex data or situations, I’m likely to try to fall back to the commandline. Just that - when there are GUI tools I tend to prefer them over an equivalent CLI tool.
tl;dr GUIs can represent the current state of a complex process and provide relevant context, instead of requiring the user to model that information (with large error bars for quality of the UI).
Anyway, I hope you take this in good humor and at least consider a TUI for your next project.