Wanderson Ferreira (Bartuka) has a project where the code can’t leave a remote machine at the other end of a slow connection. He’s an Emacser but GUI Emacs is too slow to be practical so he moved to terminal Emacs for the project.
He has a useful post that describes some of the strategies he’s discovered to make working with Emacs in the terminal a bit easier and more pleasant. He’s an Arch Linux user so some of his tips are Linux specific.
First up was to choose a good terminal emulator and get it configured. Bartuka chose RXVT and did some fiddling in his ~/.Xresources to remap some keybindings to what he was used to. If you’re a Mac user, you probably want to use iTerm2. It’s very configurable and you can change most things in the application preferences. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out for iTerm is how to map the fn key to Hyper.
Next, he runs Emacs as a daemon on the remote machine so that it’s easy to popup an Emacs buffer when he needs one. Finally, he has a few words to say about multiplexing with tmux.
I’ve written before about the advantages of GUI Emacs over terminal Emacs but sometimes circumstances dictate that you have to use the terminal. When that happens, it’s nice to have a post like Bartuka’s to help you along.