In some ways CLIs are great for discoverability, because they force everything into the familiar "list of commands" paradigm. GUIs can be either much better or

In some ways CLIs are great for discoverability, because they force everything into the familiar "list of commands" paradigm. GUIs can be either much better or much worse for discoverability, because the layout techniques that let GUIs surface important or contextually relevant functions are the same techniques that let GUIs hide the function you need behind six layers of B.S. See this article (full disclosure: written by me) that talks a bit more about some of the tradeoffs between CLIs and GUIs from a UX perspective: https://medium.com/design-ibm/real-developers-dont-use-uis-daea7404fb4e https://medium.com/design-ibm/real-developers-dont-use-uis-d... There's also this interesting project that attempts to bring some of the discoverability and other benefits of graphical UIs to CLIs: https://github.com/IBM/kui https://github.com/IBM/kui . Would love to see more work in this area.