Just adding in my perspective:

TUIs, at least to me and some friends in my circles, do something that native applications don’t: demand focus from the user.

Sure, modern terminals and TTY environments have visual tabs and virtual terminals that let you quickly toggle between multiple apps, and you can of course manually code your screen to split apps across a single “window” if you really want to get into the guts of things.

But for several folks in my close circles (myself included), the fact that each TUI occupies an entire screen by default, forces us to focus on what’s going on and what tasks we’re trying to accomplish in a way native UIs don’t. On the desktop I can flit between Discord and Telegram and multiple games and several Firefox windows full of tabs and the video encode I’m working on and hey did that bank transaction go through let’s check my email except UGH music streaming went off the rails so let me go back to my client and-

You get the idea. For folks who lack the neurotransmitters to maintain consistent focus or wave off distractions, a terminal environment acts as an accessibility device in and of itself. btop on 1, irssi on 2, Hermes (Qwen 35B) on 3, with 4 as my primary workspace and 5 as a fallback. Simple. Clean. Efficient. Lightweight.

I generally concur with the author that we should be “summoning” (I love that word for reasons that deserve their own essay/comment) more native UI apps that are as information-dense as, well, Bloomberg Terminal. There’s no reason we can’t build something as powerful and focused for the everyman for, say, inventory collections, or K8s constructs, or network architecture, all in a native UI. There’s nothing wrong with the GUI, only that at some point we let ourselves get suckered for the narrative that GUIs have to be easy, simple, and opaque, as opposed to transparent and (logically) complex. We can and should build GUIs that flow logically like the commands they’re executing behind the scenes; hell, we should be able to open a console log of every action we took in the GUI and the associated command(s) it executed, so we can better learn to transpose from GUI to CLI ourselves and build more capable or complex automations.

GUI isn’t bad. TUI isn’t bad. What’s bad is presuming one or the other is superior to everything (or for everyone) else, or worse, assuming one cannot function in a given way comparable or equivalent to the other.