How I use my terminal

> As someone that was happy that I could finally afford owning computers with a graphics display on them, this going back to the terminal doesn't stop surprising me.

GUI is not a superset or complete replacement of TUI. For many reasons, one of the reasons is that GUI is much harder and finicky to automate.

What makes TUI easier to automate?

Every command can be manipulated as text and repeated as many times as you wish. Every command is also stored in the history, can be saved to any notepad for future, shared with the community.

Every GUI automation is highly non-standard, ad hoc, finicky (usually, depends on exact pixel positions), possibly Turing complete, but even if it is, it's harder to use compared to writing a script.

Wait, you're describing CLI: command line and infinite history. TUI is a distinct thing, it exists on an addressable 2D character grid instead of the bitmapped canvas. For example top and mc are TUI applications, but there's no command line in them (unless you count passing different parameters from the external CLI or a script, which you can also do with a GUI application as it's separate from the interface).

> Every GUI automation is highly non-standard, ad hoc, finicky (usually, depends on exact pixel positions), possibly Turing complete, but even if it is, it's harder to use compared to writing a script.

The same applies to TUI applications. How do you automate top or mc? Don't conflate presentation (which is silly to even attempt automating) with internal logic.

The entire reason for TUI to exist is that TUI apps can be used in a terminal window, alongside CLI, so you don't have to switch to a separate window. But fundamentally it's just "GUI on a character grid".