That's why you aggregate, section, order, limit and use all the commands to reduce what you are looking for to something that fits on the screen. You can't "view" a billion rows straight in any meaningful way at once anyway, no matter what your client. Most of the time you're interested in some summary statistic. Graphics are often summary statistics as well.

I've found it to be quite good, you can express powerful stuff with the keyboard directly, once you know what you're doing. A GUI is always less versatile in forming joins and search criteria. Once you start having a dropdown query builder, what's the point?

I do use a separate editor often, nano or sublime, depending if I'm working on the remote or local end. Both have syntax highlight, and then it's the natural path to scripts and version control from that.