Horses for courses.

I would say 'it depends' on, amongst other things, your scale, your mix of servers/instances, your job function and experience.

I find truly ironic, this "Text Mode" obsession in the "Windows" world. Even within Microsoft's later editions of Visual Studio, there's less ad less "Visual" and more-and-more "Text Editor" for producing user interfaces.

And I get really annoyed with is people who think *their* way of doing something is the *right* way, and that any other way is deserving of scorn. That's the domain of religious zealots.

I'm a 'part-time' DBA (about 1/4 of my job time-wise), managing a score of mostly application-specific SQL instances that are mostly completely different from each other. In 'global' terms, our databases are tiny; the largest (our ERP database) being only about 50GB. So all up, we have a few hundred GB of data that I try to at least make sure is backed up regularly, and performance kept acceptable.

I use SSMS pretty much exclusively. Not that I'm afraid of a command line (I come from a VAX/VMS background, and moved to Windows out of necessity), but SSMS gives me a one-stop place to get to all the servers as/when needed. We have very few in-house developed systems; mostly I'm poking around inside some vendor's 'shrink-wrap' database trying to fix problems that have cropped up, and it's just much quicker for me to just click-to-expand databases, tables, views, etc. I use the scripting features all the time, but avoid using the GUI view designer (because I find the resulting SQL is barely legible). I find it an invaluable tool.

Most of the rest of my job is maintaining our few internally developed apps, which also involves me using SSMS as a development/troubleshooting/configuration tool. And it makes a great XML editor.

I'm sure if I was a full-time DBA to a Fortune 100 company with 500 identical servers servicing some Mega-Application, that I would have a very different view of the world. But that's not my job, so SSMS is the right tool for *me*.

I see the deprecation of GUI-based tooling as a step away from Microsoft's heritage. I believe that their GUIs (flawed though they may be) are core to the success that Microsoft have had with many of their products - the GUI admin tools available back in Windows NT days made the opposition (Novell) look primitive, and made Windows admin easy. Similarly with the Visual XXX development tools, and SQL's SSMS and its predecessor (Enterprise Manager) - they empowered people who just needed to get a job done, to get the job done, and get it done quickly, and made the products much more 'approachable' than their competitors.

For me, I think that if I didn't have SSMS, I'd have to question why I'd bother holding on to SQL Server as a platform for our internal systems; licensing PostgreSQL would be much simpler...