this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Good GUI are hard to make while a good cli is rather easy.
Nothing wrong with a GUI that does what it needs without fluff.
The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it's pretty easy to tell someone you need to run "xyz -a -b -c" (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like "so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you're looking for the 2nd tab and there'll be a checkbox".
The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.
A well documented CLI is easy to generate a GUI from.
Wait what?
Most screen recording programs are actually just ffmpeg in the back.
And dude has changed icon set, so its not a cog, its a wrench and screw driver
Good UX is the best, whether that's CLI or GUI. UX is under-appreciated.
It is very easy to tell someone type this and shut up. I've never seen an explanation of why -a -b and -c are necessary or what they do. Although I recognise that a lot of people just want magic, and running "xyz -a -b -c" is the next best thing.
I would love to see what cli commands the gui uses, they would be much easier and faster to learn.
That's one of the things I like about yt-dlp-nis on android. You can select all the options you want through the UI and grab the resulting yt-dlp cli command.
A decent number of modern TUIs do that, lazygit for example. I also find that tldr and navi do a great job of explaining those inscrutable options.
man xyz | grep -E "^ *\-(a|b|c)"More cryptic commands to the rescue! Lol
alternatively try tldr, which lists the most common options and explains them. It's a livesaver for noobs.
Edit: oh i see it was already recommended lol
As the other comment says, use TLDR. it doesn't tell you everything, but it does usually explain the most common uses. If you need something more advanced than you need to do more research anyway.
Tbh a lot of things are just easier to show/explain with images and icons in addition to text.
And in many cases mouse control is just super handy and fast
And while a terminal can show all these things… its just not comparable, IMO.
I wouldt want to write my job application in the terminal, or design a product, or whatever else requires just a smidge of graphics
LaTeX and Typst enter the job application chat
Yea that made me laugh; I just updated my resume from LaTeX to typst a few months ago actually
I'm just a faster typer and when I have to go back to the mouse controls I feel sluggish. Of course, the right tool for the right job, I will never find myself with a tui to manipulate 3D objects or editing images but I will go to vim for editing documents using latex
"I am the commander of the CLI! The CLI Commander!"