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Because making a decent GUI is harder than making a decent TUI. Also TUIs give you some nice things for free like working over SSH easily, but I suspect the lower dev effort is the big thing.

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I don't think this is true at all. Off the top of my head, the only cli ui that seems more usable as the gui equivalent is magit.

As a developer, not as a user. I mean, I also prefer TUIs as a user, but that's not the point I was trying to make.

you think so? i think making a good TUI is a pain in the ass

They are both not easy to make great, but with TUI you have way more constraints than with GUI so you can make something decent quickly and focus on important interaction and not on pixel-perfect button alignment.

Windows 98-XP GUIs were the best for such cases: there were clear design guidelines, everybody used native components, and GUI designers in IDEs were practical.

I think making a TUI or GUI is a huge pain, but having tried both I think writing a good enough TUI is easier. I suspect writing an actually good TUI is still easier than writing an actually good GUI, but I will caveat that with my lack of experience.

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