It sounds like you're being confused by the surface appearance of things, rather than paying attention to their fundamental nature. Maybe that's why you weren't able to understand the arrogant Vim guy's utterance and wrote him off as delusional instead of figuring out in what sense he might be saying something true. It's good that you did figure it out eventually even if you couldn't hear it from him.
Unix wasn't distinguished from other contemporary systems by not using a GUI. With a few visionary exceptions like NLS/Augment, SKETCHPAD, Spacewar!, and GENESYS, computers didn't have GUIs when Unix was born. The Unix philosophy wasn't about using textual commands. Every computer used textual commands except desk calculators. It was about a uniform interface that permits unrestricted composition of orthogonal software components, easy and expressive automation of routine tasks, and prioritizing usability over absolute computational efficiency. These are not, to put it mildly, Photoshop’s strong points.
I understand your point about Vim not following Unix philosophy, also the way Vim and Blender are similar.
I disagree that the GUI/command line divide is a "surface appearance". I'm not talking about Vim/VS Code kind of thing, where one is implemented in the command line, the other in the GUI, but are basically the same. I'm talking about apps which fundamentally require a pointing device. In Photoshop you point at a pixel and say "do something here", in command line ImageMagick you say "x=100 y=200". This is not a trivial difference to me, it changes everything and generates different usage scenarios.
Vim is not a command-line program. It's a screen editor. The command-line equivalents are Perl, ex, and sed.
I agree that writing +100+200x17x25 is a terrible UI design for drawing. But you’ll notice that Vim doesn't use such an interaction design for text; and typing the 100 and 200 into the properties box of a Quartz Composer processing node doesn't make it any better. So it sounds like you're attacking a straw man, maybe unintentionally.
I'm not sure what I'm attacking, certainly not Vim.
I'm just saying that you can perfectly use Vim without a mouse, in fact most guides recommend you to disable mouse (and cursor) support.
But you can't use Photoshop or Blender without a mouse. Sure, you technically can, in a limited way, you can for example crop images or apply global filters in PS with just the keyboard, the same in Blender, but certain core manipulations are impossible in both without a mouse.
I would argue that it's because of the much higher resolution of images/3d data. 80x50 with a 100 character alphabet versus 2000x2000 with a 16.7 mil alphabet. In Vim you say "move the cursor after 'func'". How would that work in Photoshop? "move the cursor after RGB(25, 15, 9) RGB(98, 126, 22)?" You can't even see the pixels in PS, let alone guess their values.
There are pixel art editors which are completely usable with just the keyboard, but they are used for images smaller than 256x256.
The best way to use Photoshop without a mouse is to use a Wacom tablet. My Fitts parameter estimates for mouse interaction are terrible, but much better than any keystroke interface I've seen, much less command-line interfaces.
You were attacking interactive image editing by typing strings of text:
> in command line ImageMagick you say "x=100 y=200". This is not a trivial difference
But I don't think anyone really thinks that's a good idea.
I agree that direct manipulation is a great benefit, and I don't think there is any plausible alternative for designating positions and especially paths in pixel images the way incremental search provides a better alternative for designating positions in text. Vim in particular is distinguished from vi by supporting more direct-manipulation and noun-verb interaction flows, and vi differed from command-line editors similarly by supporting more immediate feedback and pseudo-direct-manipulation interaction: you would change a word by typing fscwbad ^[ rather than s/strange/bad/^M, for example. I think this is an improvement.
I'm continuously kind of appalled that we're carrying around these high-bandwidth multitouch devices all day and apparently the best way we've figured out to take advantage of this situation is one-finger scrolling of lists of pre-existing options, tap-selecting, and a simulated onscreen keyboard, plus the occasional pinch-zoom. I feel like even pictures under glass is about 10 years overdue for some new UI paradigms to take advantage of the new possibilities of the medium.
I wonder if there's a way to describe and interactively refine descriptions of areas of interest in a symbolic way—as Lisp trees if not Unix strings—maybe using existing neural networks. Certainly a speculative idea, of course.
> I wonder if there's a way to describe and interactively refine descriptions of areas of interest in a symbolic way—as Lisp trees if not Unix strings—maybe using existing neural networks. Certainly a speculative idea, of course.
I think the future is more like saying to the computer what you actually want. Like "delete the apple from the picture".
Photoshop already has a primitive form of this particular action, called Content Aware Fill, where you draw a rough selection around an object you want to delete, and it will fill a plausible background in its place. Works pretty well.
In a sense these are different uses of a computer for graphics: one is a medium of human visual expression, which is Photoshop’s forte, while “delete the apple” is more like delegating a functional task to an independent contractor. I don't think one is likely to entirely replace the other, just as Photoshop hasn't replaced netpbm, photography hasn't replaced painting (even if we do more painting in PS than with paint nowadays), and the city bus hasn't replaced dancing or skateboarding, even though all of them are ways to move your body.
There are certainly some uses of PS that things like caption-to-image GANs will replace. Analogously, last night I spent quite a while with the expressive, high-bandwidth, direct-manipulation interface of a box cutter cutting cardboard, for something I'd much rather be doing with a laser cutter cutting shapes generated from a constrained-optimization algorithm. At least this time I managed to only cut the cardboard.
Texture synthesis is a really interesting tool for both purposes. There are a lot of amazing papers in recent SIGGRAPHs with new algorithms for this kind of thing.
Unix wasn't distinguished from other contemporary systems by not using a GUI. With a few visionary exceptions like NLS/Augment, SKETCHPAD, Spacewar!, and GENESYS, computers didn't have GUIs when Unix was born. The Unix philosophy wasn't about using textual commands. Every computer used textual commands except desk calculators. It was about a uniform interface that permits unrestricted composition of orthogonal software components, easy and expressive automation of routine tasks, and prioritizing usability over absolute computational efficiency. These are not, to put it mildly, Photoshop’s strong points.