exact: in many GUI tools, you can have non-default settings that you changed via menus. Where are they stored? Which ones are currently active? Does it matter that you selected four objects first, then a transform tool, then another object?
programmable: > find /var/spool/program/data -name foop* -mtime +3d -print
vs "open the file manager, go to /var/spool/program/data, sort by name, secondary-sort by last modification time, find the ones that are more than 3 days old, make sure you don't slip"
repeatable: OK, do that again but in a different directory.
transmissible: here's the one-liner that does that.
Now, your specific requests are about audio and video toolchains, where I will admit that reasoning about flows is easier with spatial cues -- but I'd really like the output of that GUI to be an editable text file.
And they scrapped it in WP6 for some shitty object oriented version that lacked all the "serializable workflow" of the previous one.
A classic CLI command composition (a.k.a. pipeline) example:
More shell, less egg:
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...
After reading that post, I wrote about it here:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-bentley-knuth-proble...
with a couple of solutions in Unix shell and Python.
Related:
Why you should learn just a little Awk (2010) (gregable.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17322412
A comment by me there:
What we need is a ubiquitous command interface where the output of any command is a tree set of typed objects and any command is free to consume any of those sets of typed objects. The typed objects in this pattern would not be limited to text.
This paradigm removes the restraints of GUI applications but satisfies a great many use cases with the obvious exceptions being any program that requires a lot of mouse or pointing device input like photo manipulation.
Why can't a pipeline be a more complicated multi-io workflow? In a 2D GUI this would be trivial to construct and read, but in a 1D command line it would get confusing in a hurry. And the concept works much better with AV, I can easily construct and reason about complicated arrangements of audio and video inputs and outputs, with mixers, compositors, filters, shaders, splitters, etc. between them.
Instead we worship text. Is that because manipulating text is actually more useful, or because our tools are only good for working with text?