{"id":7615,"date":"2018-11-15T15:08:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T20:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7615"},"modified":"2018-11-15T15:08:13","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T20:08:13","slug":"is-terminal-emacs-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7615","title":{"rendered":"Is Terminal Emacs Better?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nMost people will, I think, agree that Betteridge&rsquo;s Law applies to the headline of this post. Back in January, I wrote about a nice discussion on the Emacs subreddit about <a href=\"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=5835\">whether GUI or terminal Emacs was better<\/a>. It was a balanced discussion but the consensus was that there was really no reason\u2014absent special requirements\u2014to prefer terminal Emacs. Aaron Bieber was more emphatic in his post <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.aaronbieber.com\/2016\/12\/29\/don-t-use-terminal-emacs.html\">Don&rsquo;t Use Terminal Emacs<\/a>. His final advice on the matter was &ldquo;&#x2026;stop using Emacs in the terminal. Full stop.&rdquo;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOf course, not everyone holds that position. Over on the Emacs subreddit, vokegaf explains why he uses <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/emacs\/comments\/9x2gbd\/pure_tty_emacs_all_the_time\/\">Emacs in the terminal and only in the terminal<\/a>. He begins by listing some of the disadvantages to terminal Emacs but dismisses them as not important for him. You&rsquo;ll probably disagree with his dismissal of some of them but use cases <i>do<\/i> 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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nHe knows about Tramp, of course, but insists that starting up a remote terminal Emacs over SSH is a better solution. That&rsquo;s mostly because he likes at leave his remote environment running and attach and detach to and from it with <code>screen<\/code> or <code>tmux<\/code>. He expands on that a bit in the comments so if you&rsquo;re interested in the discussion be sure to read those too.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI 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 <code>emacsclient<\/code> and I occasionally fire up a terminal Emacs if I&rsquo;m already in a terminal and need a quick edit but normally I&rsquo;m always in the GUI version.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nAs always, everyone&rsquo;s workflow is different so there&rsquo;s not &ldquo;right&rdquo; answer. The thing about Emacs is that it let&rsquo;s you have it your own way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most people will, I think, agree that Betteridge&rsquo;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7615\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-7615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7616,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7615\/revisions\/7616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}