Three broad notes:

- I'm team GUI! The author outline elegantly why. Sometimes I put command-line-like things in the GUI; I generally view it as a superset of CLI, with vastly richer capabilities. This is kind of interesting in the bioinformatics/structural bio space, which I feel is inherently visual, and benefits from 2d layouts. Most of the tools are CLI and based in I/O of stdout and text-based files. I am taking a different direction!

> Back in 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote an essay about command line interfaces that set the field of human-computer interaction back about 20 years. In it, he depicts the priesthood of Unix nerds wielding CLIs as powerful Morlocks, holding the entire computing industry on their shoulders. The Eloi use GUIs like Microsoft Word. Because this is high-test fan-service, “In The Beginning Was The Command Line” has become one of our field’s sacred texts, despite very little of it holding up 25 years later.

We should not take Sci-Fi and creative plot devices as predictions for the future. They can be inspirations and motivations for your own creativity, if tempered by realistic expectations and discipline. Neal Stephenson is especially prescient (Certain concepts from Fall; or Dodge in Hell and Anathem are hitting home strongly right now!). He spins vibrant, speculative yarns, mixing concepts, and estimating trajectories. The story referenced he is one that's in particular easy to see what parts did and didn't pan out. (And what Neal's more recent reflections on it say)

I think there is a bit of cultural identity (Which we are genetically inclined to insert in all sorts of places!) going on. There is a certain cyberpunk fun in SSHing a terminal, pipeling stdout/in together, and Viming. I suspect there is a high overlap between people for whom Linux is part of their identity, TUI use is as well. I.e, it's not about a practical weighing of merits; standard identity/tribal-based choices.

FOr use of TUI as a general file browser/command-executor... I've made my own. It's a GUI, and has built-in terminal for executing commands, with a visual file browser. And most importantly: Shortcuts to execute commonly-used workflows, history, bookmarks etc. All of which I feel like are glaring things missing from standard terminals. (PS, Bash etc). And having a terminal as one part of a multi-window program feels like a good use of my screen space!