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From my experience, interactive CLIs are the worst of both worlds.

They are not as pretty and intuitive as GUIs, since the user has to learn terminal idiosyncrasies (e.g. unable to ctrl+c, or edit text in the middle of the sentence by mouse).

And, at the same time, they tend to be pretty bad for automating things (in the worst case, even unsuitable for automation) since now, you have to map the interactive commands to the non-interactive ones.

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It depends on tool. If this is some generic utiliy that interacts streams, it most probably should not be interactive. But for example if this tool is some kind of control shell for subprocess (like Quagga vtysh or FW control CLI) it would be much easier to use in interactive fashion (autocompletion, interactive help and hints system).

You're right in that an interactive CLI's interface is not trivial to nail. We're spending a lot of dev time on that actually. And of course there always also has to be a non-interactive version for automations.

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