alt Hacker NewsI completely disagree. Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways. Most important to me are that they are more composable and more customizable. The learning curve is tougher, but the "skill ceiling" on them is higher. The ease and speed with which somebody comfortable in their terminal based environment will navigate through the tasks they need to do will always exceed what is even possible in a GUI.
I would say that GUIs are superior for a few specific use cases, but otherwise sub par. Step through debugging comes to mind as a good GUI use case, but even that I'm not sure if it's because a GUI is inherently better, or making a terminal based debugger is harder and so nobody has made a good one yet.
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> Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways
What specific ways do you find boost your productivity the most?
For me, the things terminal workflows can do faster take up almost a negligible amount of my workday.
Curious to hear if I’m missing out on a terminal workflow, or if my workday is just very different from yours
Composability sounds great until you need to onboard three new devs who would rather gouge their eyes out than decipher an 80-line shell script that breaks on macOS because one env var or BSD tool behaves differently. That cost is not theory.
Terminal skill ceiling exists, but a lot of custom flows are just local maxima that look elegant to the person who wrote them and miserable to everyone else who has to debug or extend them. GUIs give up some raw power, yet for diff review, history browsing, and getting a team moving without turning every workflow into a tiny priesthood, they are often the better tool.