Why would you say GUI based workflows are better (ignoring LLMs for now)? I would maybe give you debugging with breakpoints but for anything else I love my neovim with tmux setup
I don't think setup time is a fair comparison here. Any dev who cares to use CLI tools has a dotfiles repo that sets up everything in "under a minute".
I mean yeah, there are tools to automate it. I think you may have a point if both of the following hold true:
1. You very frequently have to install your setup from scratch.
2. Preconfiguring something that aids in installing from scratch is not viable or sensible. (Perhaps you work in an environment where you're not allowed access to your personal dotfiles repo, for example.)
But I think most people will fail at least one of these checks.
I find that (neo)vim enable code navigation to be much faster than any GUI as well, once past the learning curve. If you’re going to work with code long term (eg: years), the learning curve pays off quickly.
Vim and other terminal tools make doing complex text manipulation easy, but I rarely need to do anything complex when writing code.
I also work from different machines and ephemeral vms regularly and don’t want to spend time setting things up each time.
I can install vscode and the one lsp plugin I need in under a minute. In contrast, Vim doesn’t even have line number enabled by default.