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Comment by jbmorgado | Hacker News Reader

+1 for this. It's basically impossible to get emacs colors to work correctly in the terminal.

And as soon as you complain you are confronted with "emacs is supposed to be run with the graphical interface, just install it with the gui and don't use -nw (no window) option"... yeah, right... no thanks.

Nobody says that.

But don't complain, better submit a patch. Or help ironing out the one linked above, it's unfinished.

I am not saying it's an official stance or such, not saying you are someone who would say that, but don't tell me "nobody says that" when that was what I got multiple times from emacs users.

If I hadn't then why would I say so?

I actually say that :)

I just think the graphical Emacs provides the most comfortable environment. It displays images (and thus also PDF files or a graphical browser widget), doesn't swallow the Alt key by default, has prettier colours, and you still get to edit remote files with TRAMP.

This doesn't mean that Emacs in a terminal should not be improved. I sometimes use it when I ssh into my workstation from a machine that doesn't have Emacs installed.

Exactly. This is one of the main reasons why I encourage admins and developers to try Vi(m): There will always be a vi or vim installed wherever you SSH to, and you will be able to work comfortably on the terminal.

All right. It's not an official stance, and a lot of users are know prefer using Emacs in a terminal (not myself, though). But some others might say that.

But what use is there to complain to them? None of them sound to be anywhere close to the Emacs development.

Weird; I've never needed to do anything more than "export TERM=xterm-256colors" provided I was using a high-color terminal emulator to begin with.

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