Magit is definitely different enough from both your conventional GUI and command-line interface to make it hard to immediately see its benefits, which is why I did not only post some commented screenshots [1] (which may fail to impress), but also a text [2] which explains in what ways Magit differs from GUIs and command-line interfaces and what sort of benefits it draws from that.

[1] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-walk-through/#start [2] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/the-magical-git-interface/#st...

A reason why it might actually be an advantage that the interface is "text based" is that the thing the tool interacts with is also text [3]. The primary difference to git is that the "output" is "actionable", the primary difference to GUIs is that every feature of git can be exposed quite naturally.

[3] And a major advantage of that is that the barrier between writing the code and thinking of it in terms of change sets starts to break down.

The point of this kind of UI is that they become an extension of yourself. Saying these UI are old and clunky is exactly like saying a keyboard is old and clunky.

Sometimes 2-clicks can be faster than 2x 3-key combo just to make a feature work and also keyboards are old and clunky, ask any k-12 kid today and they will type faster on touch keyboard than a mechanical cherry-mx powered one. People still using text-based only IDEs for productivity are just prolonging the inevitable.

Only when training is lacking. And I don't mean this in a derogatory message, either. People that are trained with a keyboard are pretty much guaranteed to be faster than folks that have only learned to work with a mouse. Discover, though, will be much much faster with an exploratory interface. To that end, the mouse will lead to faster discovery in most cases.