As of late i find myself thinking that the big DEs have been a massive distraction from what made _nix so potent. While Windows and Mac had largely tried to hide or distance themselves from the CLI in favor of the GUI, the way X11 is implemented allows CLI programs to use GUI for enhancements rather than replacements.
Blending CLI and GUI is not unique to X11; at least since .net was released on Windows this has been very easy, and it's not even that hard if you want to do this from the Win32 API.
There are also a few windows "command line" applications when invoked with bad parameters will show MsgBox or Dialog boxes instead of writing errors to the console, which is super irritating when dealing with older versions of those tools in scripts.
That said, the bog standard windows command line environment is so awful that it makes doing anything useful with this blended UI less than ideal :/
That is a image viewer that can be operated from the command line but that then produce a GUI window (or windows) that can be manipulated by mouse and keyboard.
It has also various options for displaying image properties in the terminal.
Meaning that it could be leveraged along with existing _nix CLI tools to fine images in a large directory (or even directory tree) and then display the result, all by piping commands together.
