In principle maybe, but all present implementations fall a bit short. Why can't I use my mouse to position the cursor in any shell? Placing the cursor with the mouse is something people commonly do in terminal editors like vim or emacs; the efficiency arguments against it fall flat because this is entirely optional and besides, many people use laptops with either a track-point directly in the middle of the home row keys or with a touchpad directly below the keyboard.

And there's no technical reason it couldn't be done; years ago I once did it as a proof of concept. It just hasn't made it into any major shell yet.. besides eshell anyway. It does work on eshell.

Anyway, it's not really a big deal, not important enough for me to pursue, but I do think it counts as a counterexample to disprove the "peak UX" claim. Command line interfaces in principle are great but in practice we're doing it by emulating hardware that went obsolete decades ago and piling cludges and hacks on top of that to make it feel a bit more modern.

Another example; there are a few ways to inline images in a terminal emulator but they're all kind of shit in their own ways; graphical thumbnails have clear utility when listing some directories; every serious file manager supports it but to do this in a terminal emulator is cludgy hacks.

Well, they think it is. Most of the time, it's not. Command-line tools have terrible ergonomics for many workflows and use-cases.

I agree but CLI just can't cover all use cases - just on top of my head are graphics, animation software, video editing, circuit making...

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

The best CLI will never have the discoverability of any competently designed GUI.

For a subset of tasks, maybe. But I'd rather use Firefox than lynx. And I'd rather use Thunderbird than mutt or pine.

That's what people who gained their technical competence in a CL environment always think: we're always most productive in the interfaces we are familiar with. I'll agree that most technically competent people probably prefer using the command line for many tasks, but correlation != causation. It's really easy to mistake our own preferences for being objectively good, generally... which is why designers exist, why most user-facing commercial software doesn't require reading a single line of documentation, and why most FOSS projects-- almost entirely indifferent to or hostile towards deliberate design-- are only useful to people who have a working mental model of what's happening under the hood.

I was strictly a vim guy for a decade and a half... my coworkers occasional snicker merely steeled my resolve, but I knew I was doing the pure and efficient and technically correct thing by sticking to barebones vim. Lots of vim stuff and ex commands are beneficial to my workflow, but after a coworker convinced me to try out some more modern options with vim modes, I realized that my attachment to vim as an editor was driven by my emotional investment in how many times I struggled with vim's clunkiness. I wore it as a badge of honor. I thought it gave me cred. In reality it just showed how utterly inflexible I was. The Jetbrains editors, for example, offered more functionality out of the box than I could practically cram into my vim setup, yet was completely configurable, and the features were generally intuitive and discoverable. I didn't have to look up how to do some relatively obscure thing in ex-- there was probably a menu option for it so I just didn't have to keep it in my head. Sure, vim is and always will be my default editor for light editing, and there are obviously people whose use cases are perfectly satisfied by using it. However, assuming for years that I was more technically competent for doing intensive professional work in complex codebases using that clunky old editor was plain old self-indulgent arrogance, like most other nerd badge-of-honor things are.

I've been using command line environments daily for decades, and usually head there first to do many tasks, but many of these archaic tools only persist because of a reverse eternal-September problem. By the time someone gets technically advanced enough to start influencing how our technical environments work, the curse of expertise obfuscates their downsides and they mistake their own comfort with something for it being objectively good.

We should have kept using MS-DOS...