This kind of fell apart for me when he kept strawmanning vim (and emacs I don't know it as well, but it is the same for purposes of htis argument) as a pure CLI. Given the rest of his argument about good keyboard access and visibility, vim falls pretty far on the GUI side of things. Yes, it is designed to run from the command line, yes it is a text based interface, but, it isn't the same as classic CLI stuff he is talking about like the unix shells.
Visibility: there are split windows, syntax and error highlighting, quickfix windows (use similar to dialogs in a lot of cases), file navigation, help windows, clipboard integration and so on that are so touted for the GUI in the article. (not to mention the status bar...) The gui is text/character based rather than pixel based, but that isn't such a bad thing when text and characters are the entire focus of the program anyway.
Speed: vim (and emacs) are well liked because they are very fast and have keyboard usability++.
From a different angle, an awful lot of well loved GUIs actually put a command line into the program. Many CAD programs do this, as do mathmatica (and other mathy softwares matlab, sass and so on), various repl programming environments, high end graphics packages, GIS software and so on. In fact a lot of those "best of" programs feel like they took the best of CLI and GUI and said "why does it have to be one or the other?", and instead smashed them together.
Visibility: there are split windows, syntax and error highlighting, quickfix windows (use similar to dialogs in a lot of cases), file navigation, help windows, clipboard integration and so on that are so touted for the GUI in the article. (not to mention the status bar...) The gui is text/character based rather than pixel based, but that isn't such a bad thing when text and characters are the entire focus of the program anyway.
Speed: vim (and emacs) are well liked because they are very fast and have keyboard usability++.
From a different angle, an awful lot of well loved GUIs actually put a command line into the program. Many CAD programs do this, as do mathmatica (and other mathy softwares matlab, sass and so on), various repl programming environments, high end graphics packages, GIS software and so on. In fact a lot of those "best of" programs feel like they took the best of CLI and GUI and said "why does it have to be one or the other?", and instead smashed them together.