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Why I Prefer CLI and TUI over GUI - alavi.me
(alavi.me)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Is this a take from the 1980s?
Of course cli and TUIs are great. However they aren’t as discoverable and harder to learn than a nice GUI.
Is vim or eMacs great? Sure, but so is Visual Code for other reasons.
cli and TUI suck at drag and drop and copy and paste between applications.
I solved the drag and drop issue with dragon. Copying and pasting depends purely on your terminal emulator, no?
As I've found with
nvimusing the lazy-vim config, no. That program, for example, requires a separate clipboard manager if you want to copy between it and your system.That's kind of the nature of this sort of apps. Instead of implementing the clipboard handler yourself, you just rely on whatever clipboard utility the system already has.
That's why I have disabeled it for vim. Infact I disabled mouse support alltogether.
Which terminal emulator copies with ctrl+c?
Most terminal emulators will copy with
Ctrl+Shift+c. I'm using foot, if you set this part of your config, it will copy with justCtrl+c.But now for most shells you don't have a keybind to send SIGINT, which is very commonly used.
Exactly
Well, I didn't exist in 1980s. So this is how I feel as a 2000s kid and current software engineer.
I think good ideas are worth updating for new generations.
I agree that CLI and keyboard driven systems are powerful and should be further developed. New terminal emulators like Kitty, Nerd fonts, and Lazyvim show what’s possible.