Re: Does anyone really use emacs in terminal?

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Of course, every day!


Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@gmail.com> writes:

> What's the use-case for having the terminal be able to act as an editor?

That's rather the other way you should ask: what's the use case of using
a bitmap _graphic_ screen to edit _text_?

That would be a WYSIWYG word processor, I wouldn't say, but we're far
from it with emacs.


> For me it's rather the other way around, I use the terminal within my
> editor (eshell).
>
> Seems like there's no real point in supporting terminal-mode in a text
> editor these days.

There's a lot of point, on the contrary:  there are a lot of emacing
done thru the internet, and since we don't have yet gigabit fiber
everywhere, and even if we had it, we may not have guaranteed bandwidth
to all those remote servers on which we have to edit configuration
files, or debug server programs, it is much easier to work with a
terminal thru ssh, than with X11 thru ssh (or even worse, thru vnc).


There are also users with special needs that are not fulfilled by GUI,
but who can work much better with a TUI, ie. with a terminal (eg. blind
people).


Now, of course, when I use emacs locally, I prefer to use it with X11
(but notice, without any decoration (I use ratpoison) or any other GUI
element (I compile it with no X toolkit, and I use it with:
    (scroll-bar-mode     -1)
    (menu-bar-mode       -1)
    (tool-bar-mode       -1)
so if you compared a screenshot of emacs with X11 and emacs on a
terminal (with 256 colors), you wouldn't notice any difference).

Only from time to time, when I visualize a PDF or a PNG, would it make a
difference (but then, on a terminal we could also switch to some bitmap
mode, either with a frame buffer on the console, or switching to the
Tek-4041 mode).


Even when connecting from my iPad (with iSSH), it's easier to use emacs
thru ssh in the terminal, than on X11 (which iSSH provides).

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.