Most people will, I think, agree that Betteridge’s Law applies to the headline of this post. Back in January, I wrote about a nice discussion on the Emacs subreddit about whether GUI or terminal Emacs was better. It was a balanced discussion but the consensus was that there was really no reason—absent special requirements—to prefer terminal Emacs. Aaron Bieber was more emphatic in his post Don’t Use Terminal Emacs. His final advice on the matter was “…stop using Emacs in the terminal. Full stop.”
Of course, not everyone holds that position. Over on the Emacs subreddit, vokegaf explains why he uses Emacs in the terminal and only in the terminal. He begins by listing some of the disadvantages to terminal Emacs but dismisses them as not important for him. You’ll probably disagree with his dismissal of some of them but use cases do differ. Then he goes on to list the advantages of terminal Emacs. Most of them struck me as just silly but the real issue for him is use on remote machines.
He knows about Tramp, of course, but insists that starting up a remote terminal Emacs over SSH is a better solution. That’s mostly because he likes at leave his remote environment running and attach and detach to and from it with screen or tmux. He expands on that a bit in the comments so if you’re interested in the discussion be sure to read those too.
I agree with Bieber and have never run Emacs in terminal mode as my default procedure. Sure, I have my EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables set to emacsclient and I occasionally fire up a terminal Emacs if I’m already in a terminal and need a quick edit but normally I’m always in the GUI version.
As always, everyone’s workflow is different so there’s not “right” answer. The thing about Emacs is that it let’s you have it your own way.