Only certain types of information. It's not a great way to display, for example, a comparison between two similarly-edited movie trailers. Or a map of Bremen. Or the annotations on your 2016 second quarter financial sum-up spreadsheet.

The big problem with the entire Unix philosophy is that it assumes all important data is text, when in the real world very little of it is. If you're one of the few people who can get away with text-based everything, it's great. If you're the vast majority of the population, it's a terrible idea.