Counterpoint: vim isn't quite invisible, yet is the BEST tool π₯
(which also... yeah pretty much goes mostly invisible)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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the GUIs people build arenβt good enough
Big agree
TUIs are inherently better than GUIs
Perhaps not inherently, but TUI users have much less tolerance for "lag", so TUI apps are built to that expectation. That's often not the case for GUIs.
TUI users have much less tolerance for "lag"
In a lot of ways, I think software that harkens back to an older era understood the assignment exceptional well: when you're working on a glass TTY attached to a 9600 baud modem via a microwave network to the university computer in the next state over, the latency from the connection itself was pretty bad. So to then have inefficient software that "lags" would be intolerable.
Fast forward to the present day, with broadband and 1 ms latency, it's less of a concern, sure. But good software remains good software, even if the environment has improved. And for some, my work often travels with me aboard the train, where the congested 4G backhaul really makes me appreciate the miserly bandwidth of vim and SSH.
I also find myself reconfiguring systems that only have no editor installed except VI (and sed, lol) due to disk constraints. So while the command set is grossly reduced from vim, they have similar commands and workflows that I can maintain proficiency even in these sparse environments.
"Lowest common denominator" software definitely has its use-cases.
Yeah. I agree.
I wish Sublime had a good AI integration plugin with review edits before making them and chat windows with tabs. I've had to go back to VS Code (well at least I had but the Claude integration is worse than Copilot so I might go back and use the Claude desktop app).
I tried a couple but wasn't happy and the cost of code reviewing it to be allowed to use it at work is too much work to just try them all.