this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I'm torn on this discussion. Full disclosure, I don't really understand GUIs and get confused with icons and such. I'm a command-line person and have been for decades. I'll use image editors and IDEs and so on but they often leave me frustrated.
That said, I totally get that other people are not the same, and that's completely valid. If a regular task can only be done from the command line then there's an opportunity to fill in the missing piece, the GUI. It's not a waste of time, even if the GUI is "less efficient" - it's what a lot of people find comfortable.
Where I fall on the other side is the rise of ChatGPT and its friends. People are overwhelmingly positive about typing their problems into a text box, but when the response is "paste this into a terminal window and press enter" they bail out. They're happier to go through a dozen screenshots showing them where to click through menus to get to the option visually, even if they have to try multiple times because the GUI changes with the direction of the wind and the terminal stays consistent.
Yes. I agree these chatbots are another text interface like a CLI. So to me that's again a barrier to usability when I wish to refer to graphical or linked logical items on my screen that don't have any text description. I don't work in a purely text world, where usually there are no CLI commands for what im doing.
Its likely these people find a chat bot easier as they don't need to memorise a command plus modifiers exactly letter perfect. Where one mistype can fail, or worse. Two big issues people have with a CLI. And the chatbot output is made readable too. Where on a CLI it's hard to know if something worked, not being familiar with the terminology it spits out.
I hate llms, but honestly some sort of local one that wasn't trained on the orphan crushing machine thats integrated into the terminal could really help people. But I dont think it needs to be an llm. Just a cleverly coded lookup program like fish or tldr. Something where I can type "audio" and get settings for audio to show up with brief explanations so I can troubleshoot.
I myself forget commands a lot and have a notepad file (that I made an alias for so I can open it super fast from terminal) . But most peolle find this batshit insane that youd have to do that in 2026 and i get made fun of a lot. I myself like the simplicity.
> i get made fun of a lot.
Yes. They don't understand you need a way that works for you. We are all different. There is no one-size-fits-all.