[albert_e]

Why are we emotionally tied to command line interfaces

Desktop apps are a second class citizen that do not get feature parity

Lot of actions on Claude Code seem much more suited for a thoughtfully designed GUI

Even the chat responses and links therein can benefit from judicious use of rich text and formatting and real hyperlinks to other parts of the UI or elsewhere

Favourite Skills can be toolbar buttons or menus if user so wishes.

[davkan]

For one I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten an ad in my terminal or in a tui. That alone is probably enough. And it’s so much harder to ruin the terminal experience compared to a desktop app. They don’t get pointless redesigns. I can customize them however I want. The terminal is a like an oasis in the current climate. And that before getting into utility.

[minetest2048]

You can have ads in a terminal / CLI, for example Ubuntu put an ad for their Ubuntu Pro service when you run sudo apt upgrade: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac... . But the worst thing they can do is to show a plain text

[embedding-shape]

I remember some ops back in the day putting ads into /etc/motd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_of_the_day) for free/cheap servers/services too, 2-3 decades ago.

[Jblx2]

We'll they could also send your terminal a 0x07. And let me introduce you to ASCII art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

[albert_e]

"Calude agents" cli lauched recently

It was very poor UX (from the demos i saw) -- and i tried it myself in Windows native command terminal and the rendering was horribly broken (windows is a second class OS for dev tools).

A light weight GUI with keyboard shortcuts that mimic CLI experience would have been far better without taking anything away from power users of the terminal.

[addedGone]

You do get ads, many time you can see other tools being referred (open-source), but even open-source, those tools can become commercial later-on. Advertising a free tool is still advertising.

[snitch182]

Well powershell is a pointless and optical nausea redesign of a shell. I would not call it design per se .. or maybe it was. ?

[thewebguyd]

PowerShell was great, if a little verbose. PowerShell's real strength though isn't as an interactive shell, its as a scripting language. You pass objects back and forth, not text. Its basically an interactive API explorer.

> ps aux | awk '{if ($6 > 102400) print $11, $6}'

compared to

> Get-Process | Where WorkingSet -gt 100MB | Select Name, WorkingSet

doesn't matter how the output is formatted, you aren't manipulating text directly you're working with .NET objects.

Anyway, PowerShell is the way it is out of necessity of the OS. Microsoft did try to just port ksh to Windows at one point it obviously failed because Windows isn't text based, system state is stored in WMI, COM, etc not text files.

Snover talked about the creation of PowerShell on the Corecursive podcast a couple years ago, well worth a listen: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...

[pjmlp]

I really don't get it.

Started using computers when that was the only affordable way to use computers.

For some reason, some people really love to live in 1970's with their expensive HiDPI monitors.

[hvb2]

Because it's all keyboard based. Depending on your field of work a good UI can be very different.

A few years ago I watched an account work through my companies numbers using their accounting software. It's entry method? A windows commander like tool. The menu options like add expense etc were all numbered. So he never left the numeric part of his keyboard.

The tool looked super old and obsolete but as soon as you see a power user use it, you see why.

[pjmlp]

GUIs can also be keyboard based, and there are language REPLs as well.

[benjamincburns]

I wasn't alive in the 70s, but I still prefer a terminal.

I can string together a complex series of text-related tasks far more effectively as a shell pipeline than I can by pointing and clicking in a UI. I can scale that sequence of tasks out to operate on every file on the filesystem if I want, or down to a single character in a single file.

Claude Code being a full-featured TUI is also helpful because I can quickly/easily use it remotely via SSH without having to deal with setting up X forwarding, VNC, Parsec, etc. The remote host doesn't even need to have a window manager. Sure, it'd be nice if it also had an elegant multi-page GUI so I could more easily drill into the actions its performing and make better use of my large screen to watch it do multi-agent things, but if I have to choose between the two, I prefer the TUI.

That said, I'd much rather use a GUI to do things that are actually visual/spatial in nature.

[madarco]

can't agree more, I now run my agents in parallel with "agentbox claude", "agentbox opencode" and it teleport my project and settings to an hetzner VPS

For those interested: https://github.com/madarco/agentbox

[pjmlp]

I can do the same in a language REPL, with the advantage it doesn't need to emulate a teletype.

[1718627440]

The terminal is a language REPL, which the advantage, that it is the environment the whole OS runs on.

[pjmlp]

It is an handicapped REPL, not really the same.

Such statements can only be voiced by those that never experienced what using a proper REPL actually feels like.

Not something that emulates a vt100 teletype.

[1718627440]

The "vt100 teletype emulation" only concerns the protocol in which the program describes what to draw on the display. It might be inconvenient for the programmer, but for the user it is kinda irrelevant.

> Such statements can only be voiced by those that never experienced what using a proper REPL actually feels like.

Maybe. What do you mean with proper REPL? SBCL just runs fine in my terminal emulator. As do all other kind of programming languages, like Prolog.

When I interface with the OS, I want to start programs, control the processes, setup communication channels (pipes) and tell to computer to combine multiple programs to filter, combine, split stuff and redirect it to files and other programs. These should be also be able to run several times with slight differences. All of that works just fine in my shell. What are you missing?

[canpan]

It might be overcompensation. I think UI, UX and GUIs got better up until the 90s, and early 2000s, but then somewhere GUIs suddenly got a lot worse. So a modern CLI is better and more standardized than a modern GUI.

[thewebguyd]

> then somewhere GUIs suddenly got a lot worse

Electron is the reason, and the elusive dream of "write once, run anywhere" that got us cross platform UIs that are bespoke and don't follow native OS conventions (or keyboard navigation), plus once marketing got involved and GUIs started needing to be branded instead of just fitting in with every other native app on that OS.

[rafterydj]

I see arguments like this particularly against Electron and the web development sphere in general and I think it's more nuanced than either programmers or "marketing" (read: anyone not a programmer) gives credit towards.

The "elusive dream" of 'write once, run anywhere' is realistically just people wanting to write software with direct product or service use in mind. Native OS conventions are subject to the middlemen of OS vendors, whereas the web (while basically subject to the same vendors) makes a substantial attempt at bridging the gap of writing software for your own purposes without native OS problems. This is a symptom of OSes catering/selling to developers as a platform and hooking them in the 1990s and 2000s.

This attitude that wanting to just make useful code for people and not worry about a windows 11 update breaking everything because they are irresponsible - to think that is not a valid desire is IMO a big problem.

On the other hand, you have a point that it quickly gets out of hand in terms of standards and accessibility and performance bottlenecks. WebAssembly and the WASI are so slow to come out and will by design always be slower than native performance. This doesn't and shouldn't stop us from having decently performant and decently usable program experiences, but it is a prerequisite to care about those things, and the other inheritors of the web development sphere clearly do not want to develop things properly if they take longer than the next fiscal quarter.

There is 100% good Electron code out there, just as 100% there is bad native OS code. The problem isn't inherently the goals of the 'write once, run anywhere' idea; it's more the casualty of other interests pulling away from what developers actually want.

[pjmlp]

A modern CLI would be a REPL.

[munk-a]

I don't mind a GUI (as long as it isn't an obnoxiously large ribbon or anything) - but if I'm doing work my input device is the keyboard. I don't want to interface with software through moving a mouse pointer when I can just tell it what to do with a few keystrokes.

[pjmlp]

Xerox PARC REPL sytle, and better you can get the inline graphics for free, as there is no need to emulate a teletype.

[aninteger]

And some of us love to live in the 1970s with cheap non-HiDPI monitors (or maybe it's just me).

[DeathArrow]

>Why are we emotionally tied to command line interfaces

Being a power user, having used computers for more than 30 years, I usually prefer GUI because that's an evolution over CLI.

Going from the basic interpreter on ZX Spectrum to the command line in MS DOS had me mesmerized. Going from the DOS CLI to Windows 95 GUI, had me me mesmerized, too.

I think people in general consider themselves more pro and "hackers" if they use CLI and editors like Vi and Emacs.

There are bonus points for memorizing hundreds of different keyboard shortcuts and not using the mouse at all.

If they absolutely have to use GUI, they not use a desktop environment in Linux but a stacking window manager.

[pjmlp]

Which is a pity, a real hacker uses a graphical environment inspired from Lisp Machines, Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, selecting code in the REPL with "do it", fixing it on the fly in the debugger and "redo it", changing the work environment in the flow.

Unfortunely they hear that and only understand Emacs.

[ta8903]

Would you prefer if those people used a mouse and desktop environments?

[DeathArrow]

I am not trying to diminish anyone and I do not have a preferences for how other people use computers. I was merely trying to explain why the CLI gets so much attention.

[hombre_fatal]

Why did you lambast it as an emotional attachment instead of a practical preference?

People prefer terminal apps because they run inside our terminal app environments (kitty, zellij, tmux), tend to be keyboard driven, tend to be more lightweight than GUIs, tend to be scriptable, and can be run remotely over a standard ssh session.

A conventional GUI is a nonstarter in comparison.

[cookiengineer]

Claude Code can't slopcode working GUIs

That's the real reason.

If you don't believe me, take a look at the leaked codebase from a couple weeks ago. It's the stuff of nightmares, because too many junior devs slopcoded in all places without any plan or understanding of software architecture patterns. They never actually take the time to refactor, there's dozens of outdated redundancies and orphaned modules all over the place.

Without good architecture patterns, there can be no good GUI nor good UX.

[giancarlostoro]

The reason for the CLI is because most editors will support CLIs natively, so its very easy to pop in Claude Code either via your IDE or your preferred terminal in your project directory. It's lowkey the most genius design choice by Anthropic. Why they havent made a real GUI since? No idea.

[kstenerud]

I do love GUIs, and use them for most of my workflow. But for Claude, I definitely prefer the CLI.

Since it's a CLI app, I can wrap it in yoloAI for the sandbox protection, and also use VS Code's tunneling feature to reach that sandboxed workdir (with permissions safely bypassed) through my GUI.

https://freeimage.host/i/screenshot-2026-05-19-at-141349.ByS...

[benjamincburns]

But can you paste an image into it?

I have a similar setup, but I access it directly via iTerm2 instead of VS Code's terminal. I've figured out the right terminal settings to get copying/pasting text to work (including with neovim's + register), but not images. Would be nice to paste images, though. Currently I have to SCP them over.

[kstenerud]

I've actually never tried it before. I just ran some tests now on a mac:

If I copy a file in Finder and paste it into a claude session, it shows in the TUI as [Image #1].

If I do the same, but paste into a claude session running over SSH, it pastes the path to the file, not the data.

If I open the image in Preview, copy the pixels (CMD-A, CMD-C), pasting that into a terminal does nothing.

So it looks like CC just puts UI sugar over top of the image path when it has file access to it? That's not really image pasting, though...

[benjamincburns]

I suspect the first case worked as intended, and VS Code is greasing the wheels. I'm sure there's a way to get it working in iTerm 2, though I wouldn't be surprised if the solution was some Goldbergian chain of forwarded unix sockets and a helper daemon living inside the sandbox.

Thanks for mentioning yoloAI, though. I started off sandboxing via devcontainers using kata & cloud hypervisor set up as a custom docker runtime. It worked well enough, but nested docker was super slow due to virtio-fs limitations. I recently moved to sysbox and it's a bit quicker. It's probably not as airtight as kata/chv, but good enough to keep Claude from writing a security test that deletes my whole filesystem [1].

1: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/28521

[kstenerud]

Haha yup. yoloAI is to scratch my own itch. I'm getting close to taking it out of beta, but first I'm putting it through a significant architectural overhaul in a feature branch. Normally I'd balk at doing something so heavy, but AI makes it so damn easy to do major mechanical changes (provided you guide it properly and have good tests). So far, so good! And it feels nice to fix the architectural warts before I lock in the interface.

[patates]

Composability (piping to other programs, or calling them via scripts), reachability (through ssh, for example), focus (not being distracted by all options being present) and universality (cli is more or less the same interface everywhere) are my reasons.

I still use GUI apps too, and actually find claude code to be closer to a GUI app than a cli.

[Jblx2]

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mitra/csSummer2024/hsra/lectures/...

[kordlessagain]

Why are we emotionally tied to punctuation?

[pdantix]

i would gladly use claude code via the desktop app, but it lags behind the cli in terms of supported features, so i just don't bother. last i tried, it didn't support executing CC within WSL while desktop is running in windows.

[rajveerb]

Not true anymore.

[mmh0000]

Use Claude Desktop? (https://claude.com/download)

Personally, I much prefer the CLI. The CLI is a tool that has been refined for over 50 years to excel at text input and output. Once you learn it, it can feel like an extension of your brain.

[oneneptune]

idk I just like running 6/8 terminal panes and organizing my workflows / projects in an exact space. I even tweaked my theme. and seeing them all on my side portrait monitor.

[samlinnfer]

The Unix philosophy is not emotional.

[bashtoni]

A text based interface is perfect for interacting with a large language model, and it seems unsurprising to me that it's the most popular way to work with them.

Frankly, the idea of having to decipher what a picture is supposed to represent to use a skill fills me with horror.