Yeah, the Unix tools' unfriendliness comes from their history of being developed for a literal teletype, i.e. the computer's output would come out on a roll of

Yeah, the Unix tools' unfriendliness comes from their history of being developed for a literal teletype, i.e. the computer's output would come out on a roll of paper, not a screen. In that environment you want to be very conservative with your output and can't really show a help screen. At least Vim tells you a couple of basic commands to get started with on its splash screen - ":q" to exit, ":help" for help. It still suffers from really poor discoverability and the fact that if you don't get you have to type a colon first, but interpret it as part of the help phrase and just press "q" on its own, you enter macro recording mode. Or bring up the history with "q:". Thinking about it, it should be pretty easy to add a menu bar showing the GUI entries, but experienced users obviously have zero incentive to do that.