> very hard thing to do That's pretty much the entire reason. Plain text is easy and maps 1-to-1 with the keyboard you have right in front of you. And even whe

> very hard thing to do That's pretty much the entire reason. Plain text is easy and maps 1-to-1 with the keyboard you have right in front of you. And even when you start binding commands to keys, there isn't too much choice to be made. Making good complex GUIs is really hard and it seems to have the same kind of inherent complexity like programming - you can't simplify it past giving the developer a really shiny tool with which to put buttons in widgets really easily, which doesn't at all mitigate the hardship of designing exactly where the buttons go, what they say and how they act.