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What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based, specific commands. Use the best from both worlds.

It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it ourselves.

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Well, people joke about Emacs being an OS. If you take them seriously, I think it's an example of an OS where you can run graphical applications but have a standardized way to run text-based commands from any app (using execute-extended-command, bound by default to Meta-x).

It's not really practical to use Emacs as your only OS right now, but it certainly has many of the applications I need day to day: a text editor (obviously), a web-browser (that can display images, but currently does not run JavaScript), a PDF viewer, email clients, feed readers, command shells, several videogames, etc.

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