Comment by pjmlp
6 months ago
As someone that started when only rich people could afford GUIs, I don't understand what is killer app about it.
We used text terminals because that is what we could afford, and I gladly only start a terminal window when I have to.
The killer thing about it is that it is a gateway to the shell, all the command line tooling and the best cross-platform UI.
Xerox PARC, Atari, Amiga and many others had shells, without needing to live on a teletype world.
It is only cross platform as long as it pretends to be a VT100.
It's not about needing to live in a teletype world, it is about how language/text is just a better interface for a general use computer. Computers primary feature is that they are programmable and an interface that allows you to take advantage of that is superior to one that doesn't. The programmable GUIs all failed to gain traction (smalltalk and like), that left the shell (and maybe spreadsheets) as the best UI for this. Though as AIs mature we might see a shift here as they could provide a programmable interface that could rival shell scripting.
8 replies →
> I gladly only start a terminal window when I have to.
Exactly so. I am perfectly able to work entirely in a text/CLI world, and did for years. I don't becase I don't have to. I have better, richer alternative tools available to me now.
It was very odd to join Red Hat briefly in 2014 and meet passionate Vi advocates who were born after I tried Vi and discarded it as a horrible primitive editor.