Regarding 'gui' and 'command-line' tag

Question

Given Jeff's answer, does it make sense to continue using the gui and command-line tags?

Answer 1

Jeff was merging two questions which shared a common theme. However, I think Jeff was merely trying to merge two duplicate questions, because the content was nearly identical. It appears that you purposely asked the second question and duplicated the content to demonstrate a point, which is fine. He was not attempting to merge tags, which is a far different topic.

Another way to view this question is "Should we merge the GUI and Command-line tags?" My answer there is a firm No.

The user interface is an important way to access the operating system. There are major differences between any GUI and a command-line interface, and interfacing with X/Gnome/KDE is completely different the using a shell. I would also argue that there is often very little in common between a GUI and a CLI solution.

We need a way to distinguish between these two different methods.

It's very common for an organization to manage hundreds of Un*x machines, and not a single GUI among them. Given this environment, it would be wrong to provide a bunch of GUI solutions when they clearly need a CLI solution.

Answer 2

If we really are going to merge GUI and command-line answers to "how do I do X with a [gui|command-line]" then it probably makes sense to abandon the command-line tag since we already have various tags such as shell and terminal for other types of command-line questions. The gui tag could still be really relevant to questions that are about various graphical user interfaces.

Answer 3

Yes. Sometimes a program being GUI or command line is an important part of the requirements. If you take Jeff's reasoning to an extreme, we could merge every question into “How do I do something?”

(For what it's worth, I don't think this particular merge should have been done.)