But even for editing text files you still need - maybe not a GUI, but a layer that checks the file format, gives meaningful error messages on where a syntax error is and why, etc. It's not quite the same amount of work as writing a GUI maybe, and I would also argue that you need this anyway, even when you have a GUI; but I used to think the same until I wrote a few tools that I was going to 'slap a GUI on later' and found that writing/maintaining a command line application also takes time; it's not just a few lines of code that you put before the library that's behind it.