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Absolutely nothing? That's certainly not true. My experience is that those who grew up learning the command line are so familiar with it that they excel at navigating those bespoke keystrokes more quickly than any GUI user who has to scroll, point, and click. Add to that the ability to use a command history, and shell users are often far more productive than GUI users.

As someone who has spent the last 10+ years working in Tmux - but is entirely comfortable on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments - here are the key reasons why the terminal experience is superior for me.

- I work a lot with data - and streaming data through text tools is twitch fast. If someone has a question about data - before anybody else can log in to their superset, or analytics database, and try and work through the SQL queries or charts to get the answer - I've already jammed the data through awk and got an answer.

- As an SRE - I work with a lot of systems that have pretty rich APIs - so being able to send a request, get the answer back in json, dump it into jq, select the parts I care about - maybe -c to compress it and ripgrep a subset out - is just fast.

- I work in a lot of contexts with a lot of different systems, datacenters, applications - tmux lets me keep all of them cleanly organized in a separate windows and subpanes. I'll have 15-20 windows open per week, and maybe a 5-6 panes in each- keeping 100+ different contexts (and scroll backs, bash history) - all nicely organized is really useful.

- I'm also a systems guy - and there is no other way to dig into a system but the terminal - netstat, ps, dmesg, /proc - these are all components that have only one credible path to investigation and discovery. If you aren't super comfortable in the terminal - zero way to learn about this stuff.

- Working remotely - means ssh. So - once again - terminal.

The Focus on the terminal is that it's the best tool (and in some cases the only tool) for so many of these tasks - and by performing these tasks a lot - you learn about systems - so the people who spend a lot of time in the terminal tend to know a lot more about systems than people who don't.

Different strokes for different folks, but unfortunately they take their opinions and preferences as a sign that others are inferior.

I am not one of them but quite a few programmers prefer not having to use the mouse at all when working.

The terminal is an old but astonishingly powerful user interface that is still evolving.

Good terminals can be very snappy and configurable in ways that most GUI are not.

There is also arguably an aesthetic/fetishism appeal to it.

I've worked in the terminal at some point of my career, as there was not many other choices, and I understand how someone can get really used to it.

What's a polite way to suggest you ask AI first?

Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice.

Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.

Speed and scriptability