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Comment by DrPhish | Hacker News Reader

I've always just used psql and found it sufficient for my needs. What am I missing by not using a GUI/dev tool? e.g. What would I find easier, or what is possible in the gui that is impossible or difficult from the CLI? Honest question, no snark or CLI elitism intended

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I use CLI stuff for most things, but I've found it much easier to have 5-10 sql statements in a GUI editor that I can edit arbitrarily and run at will. And the GUI results grid is nicer to get around for results sets of pretty much any size. I'd kind of like it actually if somebody could make a command line editor or Vim variant that could do that.

Have you tried this? https://github.com/ivalkeen/vim-simpledb

Leisurely thumbing through things like indexes and foreign key constraints, one handedly.

Helps a lot if you deal with many databases.

The productivity gains to be able to have an IDE like experience to manipulate data.

- ER data modeling.

- Visual representation of the database objects

- Completion while typing and visual representation of SQL errors

- Ability to change anything on the database without having to know by earth all SQL differences across different RDMS

- Exporting data into various formats

A few examples,

http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-key-features

https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/features/

I use CLI for everything else, but not for day-to-day database work. Maybe the biggest reason is that with GUI tools, I can directly manipulate the data that I'm seeing in a grid. That's helpful primarily with the local/test versions of the database.

I find using GUI tools makes it much easier to discuss results with non-database or non-technical types (like everyone huddled around a monitor), as a spreadsheet-like table view is much easier to grok then the tab/comma-delimited output of CLI tools

This. I have found it to be a great replacement for GUI tools. There are probably a few features I'd add like some kind of a snippets manager but I still find it hard to beat for reading data. For wanting to edit though, its definitely lacking.

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