I think that's it, although I don't think I'd describe it as a grid, but as a 1d list. The core concept of CLIs is linear. That's in part why streaming works so

I think that's it, although I don't think I'd describe it as a grid, but as a 1d list. The core concept of CLIs is linear. That's in part why streaming works so effectively in CLIs, because the linear medium clicks really well with the idea of streaming data. And actually the fact that a lot of UNIX commands actually operate on a graph of sorts under-the-hood is where you can see some of the limitations of this linear approach (eg trying to pipe one stream to multiple paths with each path having its own processing requires a branch which is inherently a little difficult to represent in a linear system). You can lay things out in a grid, but the same can be said of GUIs. You can consider each character a cell in a grid, but I think that's so small that at that point it's not conceptually sufficiently different from being continuous. The computational paradigm that's a grid at its core is spreadsheets.