> What does it matter if they are doing that with a mouse or with a keyboard?
It happens to matter a lot, in large part by a cognitive principle that most programmers should know, but very few do: recognition vs recall.
Text prompts in general are much harder to use because the user needs to remember the name of the command they need to type, which is a cognitive task way more difficult that recognizing the shape of a UI control with a recognizable command name on it.
> What, like this doesn't happen with GUI applications?
You're right that GUIs are not immune to terrible design, I still remember when open source developers but UIs for their software that were mere a front-end layout of the command line, and you needed to understand in full the inner workings of the app to use the UI.
However nowadays anyone who builds GUIs for a living has been trained in the principles of usability and has some knowledge of mental models and putting user needs upfront, so that style is avoided by everybody but the most isolated do-it-yourself programmers.
It happens to matter a lot, in large part by a cognitive principle that most programmers should know, but very few do: recognition vs recall.
Text prompts in general are much harder to use because the user needs to remember the name of the command they need to type, which is a cognitive task way more difficult that recognizing the shape of a UI control with a recognizable command name on it.
> What, like this doesn't happen with GUI applications?
You're right that GUIs are not immune to terrible design, I still remember when open source developers but UIs for their software that were mere a front-end layout of the command line, and you needed to understand in full the inner workings of the app to use the UI.
However nowadays anyone who builds GUIs for a living has been trained in the principles of usability and has some knowledge of mental models and putting user needs upfront, so that style is avoided by everybody but the most isolated do-it-yourself programmers.