In late 2016 I decided at last to look back to the future and try as much as possible to avoid Graphical User Interfaces, both the tacky skeuomorphic and the equally tacky flat design ones that replace them. Since then, I spend most of my productive computer time either in the command line (iTerm2 + Zsh) or in VIM, where I’ve practically taken residence. (For research and writing, I had already completely transitioned to a plain text workflow.) The sole GUI program I use these days, other than the web browser, is NVALT, but I’ve already implemented most of it’s functionality in VIM. I’m now convinced that anything beyond ncurses (i.e. text-based graphic interfaces) is wasteful, unnecessary, and distracting, and that clickable images are evil. GUIs and the mouse were the beginning of the end of computing as an empowering tool.¹ Anything worth being computed should be computed in UTF-8 and 256 colors, in an 80s looking terminal.