CLIs are only popular because gui design stagnated. guis could be just as accessible, composable, understandable, keyboardable, copy pastable, *visable* loggable as CLIs. just no one has.. tried!
gui elements could log to a console. you should be able to type them in. we should be able to log charts graphs and pictures. why are we settling for a 1970s typewriter emulator that can’t even cope with mouse input in any way other than a hacky way?
name anything you like better about CLIs.
seriously i have a whole list of my own here
https://mastodon.social/@zensaiyuki/102664322061499982
now tell me any reason why any of that can’t be done in a GUI that doesn’t boil down to just lack of imagination
@zens If I think of GUIs that would do many of those things well, I think of a REPL with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, introspectable and referencable outputs, etc. In particular, I think of something where every action that is available via the UI is also available to the REPL. That would be a GUI according to definition thereof, but would be morally closer to a text UI with lots of steroids. I think the closest thing to that in existence is the SmallTalk UI (but I haven't touched it in more than 10y, so I base it on vague recollections).
