alt Hacker NewsI completely agree that the author is right and the strawman is wrong.
For example. The strawman criticizes GUI apps because he cannot navigate them with the keyboard alone. Keyboard-navigated TUIs are the worst type of UI.
CLI > GUI > TUI.
I don't like interactive tools because they're not scriptable. I don't care about keyboard vs mouse per se.
I don't like having to use different tools for the same job depending on if it's local or over SSH, so I prefer non-GUI tools in general. I want to have the same workflow for checking the processes running on a server and on a desktop. So htop it is, even though it's a TUI.
In my experience, actual GUI and TUI applications tend to suck compared to CLI tools. Tend to. The strawman seems to think that somehow this makes that whole class of UI inherently bad, so once again, I couldn't agree more that he's wrong. Then again, I care about the actual experience, not about whether it's inherent or incidental.
good luck editing a photo with CLI tools ( though im sure someone has developed something for this lol)
to your point i think there is a lot of merit to having CLI-first development, where if it can be done in a CLI then do it in a CLI. if a GUI is to be built as an assistance tool, great, but let the actions map to commands that could be saved and re-run