alt Hacker NewsWhy are we emotionally tied to command line interfaces
Desktop apps are a second class citizen that do not get feature parity
Lot of actions on Claude Code seem much more suited for a thoughtfully designed GUI
Even the chat responses and links therein can benefit from judicious use of rich text and formatting and real hyperlinks to other parts of the UI or elsewhere
Favourite Skills can be toolbar buttons or menus if user so wishes.
Replies
I really don't get it.
Started using computers when that was the only affordable way to use computers.
For some reason, some people really love to live in 1970's with their expensive HiDPI monitors.
I do love GUIs, and use them for most of my workflow. But for Claude, I definitely prefer the CLI.
Since it's a CLI app, I can wrap it in yoloAI for the sandbox protection, and also use VS Code's tunneling feature to reach that sandboxed workdir (with permissions safely bypassed) through my GUI.
https://freeimage.host/i/screenshot-2026-05-19-at-141349.ByS...
Composability (piping to other programs, or calling them via scripts), reachability (through ssh, for example), focus (not being distracted by all options being present) and universality (cli is more or less the same interface everywhere) are my reasons.
I still use GUI apps too, and actually find claude code to be closer to a GUI app than a cli.
Why did you lambast it as an emotional attachment instead of a practical preference?
People prefer terminal apps because they run inside our terminal app environments (kitty, zellij, tmux), tend to be keyboard driven, tend to be more lightweight than GUIs, tend to be scriptable, and can be run remotely over a standard ssh session.
A conventional GUI is a nonstarter in comparison.
idk I just like running 6/8 terminal panes and organizing my workflows / projects in an exact space. I even tweaked my theme. and seeing them all on my side portrait monitor.
>Why are we emotionally tied to command line interfaces
Being a power user, having used computers for more than 30 years, I usually prefer GUI because that's an evolution over CLI.
Going from the basic interpreter on ZX Spectrum to the command line in MS DOS had me mesmerized. Going from the DOS CLI to Windows 95 GUI, had me me mesmerized, too.
I think people in general consider themselves more pro and "hackers" if they use CLI and editors like Vi and Emacs.
There are bonus points for memorizing hundreds of different keyboard shortcuts and not using the mouse at all.
If they absolutely have to use GUI, they not use a desktop environment in Linux but a stacking window manager.
Use Claude Desktop? (https://claude.com/download)
Personally, I much prefer the CLI. The CLI is a tool that has been refined for over 50 years to excel at text input and output. Once you learn it, it can feel like an extension of your brain.
The Unix philosophy is not emotional.
A text based interface is perfect for interacting with a large language model, and it seems unsurprising to me that it's the most popular way to work with them.
Frankly, the idea of having to decipher what a picture is supposed to represent to use a skill fills me with horror.
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i would gladly use claude code via the desktop app, but it lags behind the cli in terms of supported features, so i just don't bother. last i tried, it didn't support executing CC within WSL while desktop is running in windows.