I consistently surprises me how many people can't grasp the advantages of both approaches CLI and GUI. For me the key thing about CLI's is the same as the bene

I consistently surprises me how many people can't grasp the advantages of both approaches CLI and GUI. For me the key thing about CLI's is the same as the benefit of plain text in the traditional unix style of thinking. When your interface to any functionality is plain text you have the advantage that you can use any number of generic tools to manipulate that interface. One example is how visual programming languages are mostly failures. It doesn't take long before the inherent problems of composing a program in a GUI is made clear. Text is easily malleable. You see this on many levels. You might be in an IDE and need to change a value of multiple settings or duplicate some setting several times, except there is no tool in your IDE to actually do a substitution of values in arbitrary settings or do duplication. However when settings are represented as just plain text, this becomes a trivial matter to solve. One of the reasons I love macOS so much is that from the very beginning of OSX Apple made the interaction between GUI and CLI very smooth. They both have strengths and I am no fundamentalist, and so they should work well together. You see that in how Apple early supported things such as dragging and dropping objects from the GUI into the terminal.app or the "open" command which allowed you to invoke the appropriate GUI tool for a given file type from the CLI. The Plan9 guys probably went furthest in this. They seemed to have woven GUI and CLI thinking tightly together.