Why I'm not a Terminal Guy Anymore

hen I was 5, the family computer ran DOS. My teenage older brother had written a script so I could type “games”, press enter, and then there would be a numbered selection of all the games on the computer. For me, this was the perfect UX.

One terrible day, the powers that be installed Windows 3.1. I was devastated.

So do not question my legitimacy as a Terminal Guy™. I am dyed in the wool. I have written lovingly about my Vim, my Tmux, etc. I have a video of my phone of my son at 2 saying “open up Vim, open up Vim” in front of the fake laptop at IKEA. It is not lightly I say that coding agents are just better with a GUI. (I use both ChatGPT Desktop and Cursor).

This comes down to two things:

1. GUI is better for reading prose than the terminal.

2. GUI is easier to keep organized than the terminal.

Reading

Proportional fonts are way better for reading than monospace fonts. There’s a reason print books use proportional fonts. There’s a reason that’s the browser default.

They give you something like 20% more real estate. Imagine a UI with a useless block that takes up 20% of your screen.

Subjectively, I find proportional more comfortable to read. Objectively, I searched a little bit and it seems that the science thinks we can decode monospace fonts just as fast as proportional fonts. So alas, I cannot beat you over the head with my opinion using Science™.

Monospace has its advantages for code: alignment, giving proper emphasis to punctuation characters — but I write code by hand far less than I write prose to coding agents, and far, far, far less[…]

Scrolling

Speaking of scrolling, another point in favor of GUI.

I hate scrolling back in these terminal agent sessions. Not sure exactly why — it feels like I’m always losing my place. And the agent always blathers so much that my window only shows the last […]

I never really had a problem scrolling bash sessions in the terminal — perhaps because the output of bash commands is a lot more visually heterogeneous than paragraph after paragraph of AI prose?

In the GUI, you have the scrollbar of course. I lose my place less. And the ChatGPT app has these brilliant little tick marks so I can peek through and navigate to the user messages in the chat.

Screenshot:

Organization

I really like having a little sidebar where I can see what sessions I have and which ones need my attention.

Before that I was splitting tmux panes, promoting them to their own windows, and naming tmux windows manually with single-word names in the sidebar at the bottom. This scaled comfortably to me having 4 somewhat active sessions; inactive sessions I just had to kill and ~forget about.

The sidebar paradigm is just better, especially in a world where sessions are spinning up other sessions and communicating with them.

• Caveat: I should probably try cmux. I have not.
• Caveat: The claude TUI was just starting to add features related to session organization back in June when I switched to GUIs. Maybe it’s good now?

Another thing I get a lot of mileage out of is Codex “deeplinks”, e.g. if I click on a link to codex://threads/017045c6-ef46-7374-8200-b1b97322d4c8 it will focus that particular session. This is useful when my agents are writing Slack messages to me, or when they are rendering custom .html for me to look at.

The future

Would I ever switch back to doing things in the terminal?

I think if there really were the agent chat equivalent to Vim — “you’re going to invest a little bit in learning this ‘language’ of different composable agent management primitives and loading it into your muscle memory, and after that you will feel like a leet haxor” — that would be pretty compelling to me.

On the other hand, I really hope (and expect) that agent management will just die. My ideal is a single chat where I can stream-of-consciousness (via conversational voice), have things automatically routed to the right context, and there’s an agent controlling some rich UI surface (a browser? my entire desktop?) so I can observe results in a high bandwidth way.

Terminal doesn’t seem the likely place for this to arrive.