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I've decided to take the console challenge over at ^C, wherein you accomplish every task from the console alone.
Despite my common sense, I went hardcore by installing a headless VoidLinux, to feel the full weight of the console upon me.
My god it hurts.
But maybe not for the reasons you're thinking. You see, after the book "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" came out, the ideas of user experience and graphical interface became intertwined. But the idea of good UX with console apps? Never became a thing.
It's still that way today.
What people got wrong about Macintosh back then, and still get wrong to some extent, was the idea that the UX was all about "pretty pictures and dialog boxes." So you had these "Apple imitators" who basically shoved a bunch of text into a grid, slapped some buttons on it, and called it a GUI.
They just didn't get it.
But MHUIG covered it all. Written with the help of psychologists and developers, it had sections on people with physical disabilities, respecting others, and how the interface should mimic the real world. It explained feedback, tactile response, consistency (a very big point), phrasing, WYSIWYG... Each of these topics were lionized as sacred tenets that made "Macintosh" special.
Of course, these ideas weren't just Apple's. But with a 300+ page back-breaker of a tome, Apple made sure you knew they weren't effing around. "UX is king" is what they said; you could feel it in every page.
After 1984, our interfaces got better and better, but not on the console. Maybe it was because console guys thought UX was just a dumb GUI thing. Maybe they never learned to care. But the result is, modern console apps are riddled with diy terminology, freaky keypresses, inconsistencies, unguessable exe names, and a myriad of other bad UX decisions that we should have learned to throw away in the 1970's.
My favorite riff on this calamity is the satirical website "Git man page generator." It generates faux git commands then "helps" you with extraordinarly convoluted documentation... just like git. (Since then, git has gotten a little bit better, perhaps because its UX became a joke)
The point is, I'm suffering! Give me pity! But it's not the lack of pretty pictures. It's fundamental UX stuff.
I think the worst part of this challenge is the Web. I don't know how to use it inside the console without being reduced to tears. And literally everything I need to know, I need to know by searching the web (this could be a "me" problem). For now, web research is the only thing I allow myself to "cheat the challenge" with. I need my GUI-quality UX. You'd be this way, too after manually typing out 50 URLS.
All that said, multitasking isn't too bad in the console (surprisingly). Tmux works, but again, with freaky keypresses. Why? WHYYYYYY?
Ahem.
In conclusion, OUCH.