I think it's a little harder to learn a cli than point and click but the knowledge you (have to) pick up becomes invaluable further down the line.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to develop in a pure dos type world (although Vim is quite fast and user friendly once you get the hang of it) and a gui is/can be more efficient for obvious reasons as long as there isn't too much 'bling'.
For example, Devcpp is minute in size compared to VS (even if you could load it without .net), is more flexible and easier to build plug-ins and is pretty simple in design. Plug in the MS compiler and you would have a use able ide with a reasonably sized footprint with a windows optimised compiler.
>>> ... remember data input into ACAD prior to dialogs ??
no, thank God! That would have me running for a pencil in no time
As bad as that might have been, the introduction of lisp and scripting brought real power to it, now acad tries to give you all that you think you need out of the box. How far has Autocad come really since 2000 in regards to real productive additions/tools?? (that's rhetorical btw, I don't want to pollute the thread with an argument
)
ok, drifting from topic a bit but it's still related I think, all these features we have to have every year are becoming more trouble than they're worth, I really think that todays software (particularly from the major co.'s such as adesk, MS et al) has not only reached, but has gone past the point of diminishing returns as far as productivity increase is concerned.
IMO they have to stop selling software as a product and start selling it more as a service, then we might start to get some reliable and more useful/productive software.