And the wider world would be a much better place if more people knew the command-line, the Unix philosophy and were able to unlock the true power of their machine.
Pipes, for one, are not even a properd full featured stream implementation. Most of this power is for obsolete text-based processing.
And CLI interfaces are inherently inferior. There's nothing you can do in a CLI you can't do in a GUI (since the GUI can have an additional textual input interface for CLI commands).
But GUI adds full color-coding, image capabilities, direct manipulation of objects (with mouse, digitizer, touch, etc), discoverability of commands (they are there on your eyes), and tons of different ways to compose workflows and actions.
The only problem is that we don't have a generic GUI stream standard like we have Unix Pipes etc. We only have it for specific apps and domains (e.g Quartz Composer or any video NLE node GUIs). But than again, unix pipes are pretty contrained and specialized themselves. If you're not text-mangling there's not much you can do with the regular userland.
In principle you can add full colors, image capabilities and direct manipulation of objects to a shell, see for example IPython (the Qt-shell) or Mathematica. Ultimately any large enough GUI application will add scripting support, take autocad for example. There are arguably tons of simple applications that are simpler to use if implemented as command line tools, for example video/audio conversion, archival tools
>In principle you can add full colors, image capabilities and direct manipulation of objects to a shell, see for example IPython (the Qt-shell) or Mathematica.
Sure, but I'd call those GUI apps.
A GUI app can have textual command input, as it just needs a text entry widget to do so, but a CLI command can not have graphical elements -- since with CLI most people (including me) mean stuff that runs in a terminal, either with command line input or with some curses library.
In my eyes it is unfortunate that the terminal standard we are stuck with is dictated by a device designed in the 70s (vt100). There have been more advanced terminals, that had support for graphics and so on.
