why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.
can someone please explain this to me?
I am not one of them but quite a few programmers prefer not having to use the mouse at all when working.
The terminal is an old but astonishingly powerful user interface that is still evolving.
Good terminals can be very snappy and configurable in ways that most GUI are not.
There is also arguably an aesthetic/fetishism appeal to it.
I've worked in the terminal at some point of my career, as there was not many other choices, and I understand how someone can get really used to it.
Speed and scriptability
What's a polite way to suggest you ask AI first?
Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice.
Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.
id prefer a human to explain it to me
I actually was a Cursor advocate / CC hater (go back in my comment history), and now I use only TUI coding harnesses.
To start a big part is just the efficacy of them, which comes down to the model and the harness logic itself. CC is good, it's sub-agents, loops, background jobs / agents, skills/hooks/etc have typically been pretty far ahead though others are constantly catching up.
But you're sort of missing something. I use iTerm, so to me it's not the TUI itself, it's iTerm. And while it's imperfect, what I get is this:
I can open and close sessions nearly instantly and tile and window and tab them as flexibly as I want, plus it's a system I'm familiar with in terms of shortcuts etc. Has my configured theme, fonts, etc all set up. Every GUI app is different, every TUI app has half of the UI already incredibly familiar to me, it's not "just text", it's iTerm.
That also means they all are the same - I run Codex and Claude and pi side by side, and i switch between them with no overhead and minimal mental model shift. Sure, different harness does suck but that's the same issue with GUI just with an additional new layer to learn.
Smaller thing is because it's all text, there's no limits on my ability to copy things out. And it's a really fast text renderer that can render tens of thousands of rows efficiently. Many GUIs have various dialogs, unselectable areas, virtualization, or just slow past a point. I trust my terminal scales.
Just a few reasons.