[blub]

You're observing something else: software people are the only ones obsessed enough with improving their tools to continuously debate and re-invent them.

Sadly this obsessive search for the ultimate workflow becomes a goal unto itself, leading to a life-long unsuccessful and unsatisfying search that is doomed to fail.

Meanwhile, in the real world GUIs have long superseded any text-based UIs, speciality tasks aside. E-mail is not a special task...

[toxik]

The reason terminals and TUIs are still prevalent in tech circles is that it is a fairly good lowest common denominator. It makes sense to implement interfaces as TUIs. This then creeps into "higher-order functions" such as the terminal integrations for GitHub, or these new TUIs for e-mail. TUIs are basically 100% portable, there is no "does this work in Firefox and Safari?" worries, and the upfront development cost is lower because there are no inherent network transfers as in HTML/JS.