Easier to attract new users? Wife Acceptance Factor?
Perhaps you use the Lynx text based browser instead of a more modern one?
EDIT: I just realized EMACS is your preferred GUI 
This thread was not about something supported in OH2 is missing in OH3!
I really like the changes introduced!
But after loosing an OH2 instance because of a faulty SD card I prefere sticking to readable, reviewable text files in any way possible.
But no new UI is supporting such a configuration, which is a big loss in my opinion.
And just because the new UI is so great I would love to use it!
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Oh no, I am not the dev of the new UI, kudos belong to @ysc.
I still don‘t understand users wanting to use the new UI, but don‘t want to use the embedded config „tools“
You can backup the UI config and restore it.
this can be done on openHAB‘s CLI.
Yes but what kind of new users? Do those sort end up contributing to the community? Improving it? I am sure some do. But I don’t think it’s good strategy (for long term health of community) to alienate power users, who in my experience (over many years, decades even, and many fora) typically become the backbone of said community.
EDIT: Forgot to add, I love OpenHAB and care about it and want to see the project continue to thrive (although in a sustainable way) and this is a big motivation for my comments (in addition to personal/selfish ones).
I realize you are perhaps somewhere between making a joke and/or implying these are relics of a bygone era. However lately I have actually become quite interested in the “small web”, things like Gemini and related protocols, as the castles of proprietary JavaScript and walled gardens of the “modern web” are absolute cancer IMO.
Those who can spread the popularity of OH, possibly contribute other that development & possibly encourage other new users who can develop in Java?
Lazy programmers? ( Remember, that is why they write a program.)
I do not know Java but am active supporting the Z-Wave binding database and other parts.
Yes I got this now, but this seems more like a workaround for me.
Sometimes I just drop the userdata dir to start clean again, but now this would not be possible. After start I had to overwrite the specific files.
Also one part of my backup is the conf dir, with this I would have to use the cli for the addiotional backup of the ui.
Whats next?
This is getting pretty complex unnecessarily.
There is plenty of room for mistakes. While editing something in the browser I will forget to backup the changes 2 out of 3 times, especially if I do some minor changes in a month from now…
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Perhaps I can explain this. And again, I speak only for me, but it seems that “some” others have a similar opinion.
The new UI is much better then the old Paper UI in openHAB 2. With the model I had done today, my family can use the Webbrowser of there mobile devices easy and understandable, without knowing the details behind.
I, as the adminstrator, can also check for every thing and every item, if I had done the things correct.
And I can test parts without destroying my running main system. For example, I bought the last days before Christmas a Velux KLF200 gateway. I setup in a virtual Maschine on my iMac a second openHAB 3 instance and integrate with one velux.things and one velux.items file the settings for our installation. After testing everything, I had only copied this two files into my main openHAB 3 installation and the work was done.
O could not see any similar way to test and configure a single binding separate with the UI driven way.
Additional, I have Alexa integration and Homekit is on the ToDo. Also here I use the new and comfortable UI to check every single change.
So it makes a lot of sense to define configurations in text files. And when I think about it, the trend to flat file CMS systems has also the reason in easy administration in comparison to data base cms.
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My apologies (and kudos!) to Yannick then!
This is exactly the problem I try to address. I understand perfectly well those who prefer GUI. However the reciprocal of that often does not seem to be the case around here. This is an alarming trend to me, and why I decide to voice my concerns.
But more to your specific point, I suspect many of us are like “admin” or “home IT” support, and then we have “users” (wife, kids, friends, family, guests, etc.). So those of us who are administering the system have our preferred tools, even if many of other users of same system use other interfaces (voice, web, GUI, etc.).
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That‘s not the point, the last post here had been about configuring the UI itself, e.g. the pages section.
I was not talking about configuring things and items.
The JSONDB files have it‘s own backup and you can configure, even textual, how many backups should be kept.
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I absolutely understand, but especially creating the UI for my family to use, I love to be able to use the UI on my iPad to modify it. Can‘t imagine to do this text based.
And where is the Backup located?
In the same shelf is not really cool if the whole house is burning…
That is why we leave it up to you to automatically copy it to your offsite backup location or disaster recovery site. 
If the house is burning, aren’t your automated devices burning too??
No, that is the point. Because this was only a small example of the complete configuration-set in the openhab-conf folder is stored. The same belongs to the persistent configuration, the sitemap, which I use for the openHAB App (iOS).
I also did not install any binding over the UI, I add this in the addons.cfg. So when saving, openHAB install the binding by itself. So I support theKBro.
So perhaps, like I accept the arguments pro UI driven workflow, the others can accept that users like us have the wish for 100% support for text file configuration.
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EPL licensed software can be forked. You are then free to implement that. I do not know id PRs addinf that to OH would be considered.
Even if I repeat myself, it is absolutely fine to configure your openHAB 3 installation via text files. This has not changed since 2.x and there are no plans to change. So nothing was taken away.
Is there missing any config option? Apart from the UI itself (which we had just today), I don‘t think so. If it is, and I asked this some posts ago, let us know, might be that what you are looking for is just not documented actually.
Oh Bruce, please. That cannot be a real answer to a my wish to accept other opinion.
Please read again the Tutorial Overview from openHAB 3.
Bulk changing, sharing and synchronization configuration, examples in documentation, …
They are official reasons to do this and all we wish is a complete support. In openHAB 3 is the pages part missing and that is, why we have the discussion.
If you don’t want to configure over text files, fine. I don’t will speak against you. But learn to respect other opinions.
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Perhaps, but like theKBro said, there is no folder “pages” in openhab-conf. So the hope dies last, but in the moment I did not see this.