[icebraining]

"GUIs also have the advantage when it comes to presenting and editing information that is by nature graphical. This includes photo manipulation and watching movies (I have always wanted a program that shows a movie in my terminal by converting it to ASCII art in real-time, that would be sweet)."

This is an interesting discussion - what is the CLI, exactly? My personal PDF viewer is Zathura[1], which is controlled like VIM. On the other hand, programs like Kismet run on a terminal, but have mouse controlled menus.

Personally, I feel that Zathura is a CLI application, even though it depends on X, because the interaction is done in a keyboard driven way with no graphical widgets.

[1]: http://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/

[nitrogen]

I have always wanted a program that shows a movie in my terminal by converting it to ASCII art in real-time, that would be sweet

For the benefit of the original author, mplayer and xine both have ASCII art output modes (mplayer -quiet -vo aa, aaxine).

[a3_nm]

True. I often use text-based applications because I can usually expect them to have a sensible and efficient interface which does not require the mouse. There are graphical applications which follow the same spirit, but they are pretty well hidden.