> Alt-N goes to the next "window", Alt-P to the previous and so forth

Thanks to this sentence, it dawned on me that even if you're a l33t hax0r, GUI and mouse-based interfaces have the advantage of not requiring you to remember how to use a program. How many program interfaces can you keep in your long term memory? Is it even worth it to waste your precious (human) memory space in such a thing?

Sure, TUIs and UNIX commands can be really useful and efficient once you learn them, but GUIs are useful even if you've never used the program. They give you an acceptable level of productivity right off the bat, and most of the time it's not worth it to waste your time learning the superior UNIX/terminal version.

While I agree that a GUI can be a bit more discoverable in general, I don't think CLIs (and more generally, terminal-based programs) are necessarily for the l33t crowd. We've just been conditioned that way by the fact that most user-facing applications these days are GUI based.

But think of the DOS-based programs of yore, like WordPerfect 5, and the Turbo C/Pascal IDEs... they had menus on screen, easy-to-access help screens, etc. to guide the novice. (What's the Web-app equivalent to the F1 key?) History shows that WordPerfect was fine to use as a non-technical person. (I wish our modern word processors were so simple to use as WP 5, actually -- modern app-design trends have bloated the word processor into a confusing mess, IMO, and I think the average office worker who has worked in both generations might agree.)

I really like the approach taken by the 'which-key' extension for Emacs, which is particularly well used in the Spacemacs distribution. Pressing the space bar pulls up a very nicely organized menu of actions, including access to help. It's extremely helpful both as a memory aid, and also for discovering new features.

Obviously a nice menu doesn't get the user fully past the initial Emacs learning curve, which supports your argument. But for the next level of user -- from novice to initiate -- it's a tremendous productivity boost.

- https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key - http://spacemacs.org/