Re: Does anyone really use emacs in terminal?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Steven!

Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@gmail.com> wrote:
> What's the use-case for having the terminal be able to act as an editor?

"The" terminal?  There are several.  I run Emacs in a Linux virtual
terminal, unless forced to use a GUI setup - e.g. for testing elisp.

Why?  Because I want to run Emacs without distractions, without window
borders, without the mouse, without faffing around with fonts, and with my
Emacs frame filling the _whole_ screen.  As somebody else said, why use a
graphic environment for manipulating pure text?  A GUI is a general
unspecific mush, whereas a TUI is optimised for text.

Setting up Emacs on the virtual terminal is some work, agreed; you have
to extend the rather sparse keyboard layouts, and then teach Emacs how to
understand the new keyboard codes; working with several frames can be
awkward, so I wrote a little utility for key <Fn> to switch to frame n.
But the effort is worth it.  To me, being able to run Emacs on a terminal
is one of its chief attractions.

> For me it's rather the other way around, I use the terminal within my
> editor (eshell).

You can do that on a terminal too.  :-)

> Seems like there's no real point in supporting terminal-mode in a text
> editor these days.

Well, thanks very much!  I believe that Richard Stallman uses Emacs on a
virtual terminal.

It is sometimes useful to have an editor available during installation of
a GUI, before that GUI is usable.

Are you suggesting you're willing to put in the work to remove terminal
support from Emacs?  It'd be a lot of work.  What would be the point?

> -Steven

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).