This post has made it to the Hacker News front page. See the discussion .

Last week I came across a post on Hacker News that encouraged application developers to stop making terminal user interfaces 1 (a.k.a. TUIs) and instead focus on graphical user interfaces (a.k.a. GUIs). The post reached the HN front page and sparked a lively debate in the comments section.

I think there is merit in both sides of the debate. On one hand, I understand the GUI-positive arguments of the post author. In theory, the capabilities of GUI application frameworks are a superset of the capabilities of their TUI counterparts, so they should be preferred. On the other hand, as a heavy terminal user , I also greatly appreciate all TUIs that allow me to “stay” in the terminal and fulfill all my needs.

But I want to oppose a recurring argument in favor of TUIs that in my opinion does not have a solid foundation 2 .…