Whether a CLI will beat a GUI depends on whether the operations are at the right level of abstraction. When watching Gary Bernhardt's refactoring session, he was using text editing operations to refactor. Text editing operations aren't an effective basis for refactorings. Building refactorings out of AST rewrites is much more reliable, then offering those refactorings as atomic operations. I don't see how to offer such refactorings from a CLI, but that could just be my narrowness of vision.