alt Hacker NewsI also like them so I can mention some things that spring to mind:
- Some are very good tools that have no clear GUI superiors. Vim, Emacs, Mc for example. GUI wrappers over these don't make them better.
- Efficient, meaning fast and limited in scope so you can learn the whole thing.
- The muscle memory you develop is transferable to any new platform or OS you use.
- Often free and OSS so they can't be taken away, making the muscle memory a long-term investment.
- If you work in the terminal for any other reason there's less context switch.
Muscle memory and awful connectivity in remote places (well, not even that remote for me) is what so many GUI apps undervalue, and I don't think the author of the article has ever thought of or encountered this. I loved TUIs back in the '80s and '90s when convention was so consistent across applications that muscle memory transferred seamlessly. Plus one could use a mouse to select menu options or the keyboard (like the many Microsoft programming environments like QuickBASIC, QuickC, Microsoft C as well as competitor products like Turbo Pascal and many others).
The low bandwidth / high latency lossy link problem is still a major issue. Cell phone service is sufficiently shitty in the area I live in that I have to use mosh to get a usable remote connection many times a year. Mosh is also quite useful while travelling! Got a crappy connection on a train or airplane? No problem. I have so much muscle memory with the mutt email client that nothing else has ever come close. Where's the equivalent of mutt's limit command in Thunderbird?
Try getting a usable VNC session when your cell phone hot spot is hitting 2-30 second ping times (yes -- thirty seconds) with only a handful of packets getting through.
Version 2 of the Amiga's operating system did a great thing in version 2 of AmigaOS which explicitly spelled out what conventions to apply (see Amiga User Interface Style Guide at https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide). Modern GUIs that have weird meaningless buttons are infuriating. Even moreso when they lack obvious keyboard shortcuts.