GUI apps are good for discoverability. They generally are not optimized for rapid use by power users though. That's of course not an inherent limitation of GUI apps, it's just that dominant paradigms hardly seem to consider power users.

I'm still annoyed and baffled by the fact that Ubuntu had searchable application menus 10 years ago, which were awesome and worked for just about any program, and then dropped them when they abandoned Unity. And neither KDE not Gnome thought to bring them back. In stead, many apps have since dropped application menus entirely, in favour of... some mishmash of icons and ad hoc menu buttons?

Also, even in the post-LLM era, building a decent GUI app is a lot more work than building a decent terminal app.

Terminals are text. Text adds features missing from gui namely:

* Ad Hoc

requirements change and terminal gives ultimate empty workbench flexibility. awesome for tasks you never new you had until that moment.

* Precision

run precisely what you want, when you want it. you are not constrained by gui UX limits.

* Pipeline

cat file.txt | perl/awk/sed/jq | tee output.result

* Equal Status

everything is text so you can combine clipboard, files, netcat output, curl output and then you can transform (above) and save. whatever you like in whatever form you like, named whatever you like.

Personally, I find a REPL-based programming interface to be the most flexible and powerful way to interact with code.

My typical interface is that I have an editor open where I write package code, and then I have a julia REPL open beside it where I load the package (or includet the script or testset). Any changes I make with my editor to functions or structs in the package / script / testset are automatically reflected in my running julia session via Revise.jl.

I then execute the functions interactively from the REPL, introspect into data or generated code, debug, run benchmarks etc all from the REPL.

GUIs are great for many things, but they lack the flexibility I need for my day to day work.

Why? There is huge compatibility layer build on top of this and changing even these minor things will break stuff in places you do not expect. Want a fancy terminal? Install another one. By default most allow changing to many terminal formats. Break things to move forward is fun when it's not your problem to solve down the line.

Graphical applications are great if your workflow mirrors the workflow that the GUI was designed for. However if your workflow differs then you’ll often be fighting the GUI.

Think of it like different types of programming languages. Some are more suited on different types of problems than others.

For me, my workflow is about composing and gluing different processes together rather than using a standard defined tool repeatedly in the same way as that tools UI was originally designed. So the CLI is ideally suited for me in all the areas where a GUI would be high friction.

> it's not clear to me what type of work those people are doing.

As little as possible. Anything that can be done in a terminal can be scripted and automated, put under version control, and deployed using modern CI/CD and devops tools.