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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about Emacs compared to vim/neovim is that it has first-class GUI support that's not simply a terminal emulator in a window.

I know about gVim and hundreds of half-baked neovim frontends, but the default way of running emacs is through a bonafide GUI, and I love that.

Terminals are alright, but they have too much historic cruft and limitations that actually do not make any sense in this day and age.

If your issue is running Emacs on a remote server, there's TRAMP and emacsclient (does it work over TCP?)

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The great thing about running everything in a terminal is you can copy anything that is shown in the terminal. Frustrating when a GUI app won't let you copy some text it's showing and you have to retype it somewhere else by hand

This is not an issue with Emacs though, GUI or otherwise, because everything's just a buffer

Many dialogs that look uncopyable actually support ctrl-c, sometimes even giving some funny ascii art of the buttons.

Emacs allows to copy anything into anything.

Pasting into a terminal is such a minefield, though.

On net I'm not sure it's an improvement. Being a pure ncurses-esque console app limits the richness of what you're able to display. Native controls and dialogs are in fact a good thing and not a cardinal sin.

> Pasting into a terminal is such a minefield, though.

Huh? Just use Ctrl+Shift+V or even Ctrl+V if your terminal emulator of choice allows that? I don't see where the minefield is

Well, god help you if what you're pasting contains unicode for a start.

> The best thing about Emacs compared to vim/neovim is that it has first-class GUI support that's not simply a terminal emulator in a window.

Not true. There are lots of native front-ends for Neovim; Neovim was architected from the start to enable them [1]:

[1]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui

this 10,000,000,000%!! (dr stone ref.) I love modal editing and vim a ton, but I couldn't stand the half baked solutions terminal editors gave me. We have an entire rich graphical platform, why not use it?

This depends heavily on your workflow. For example I use vim almost exclusively for editing files, and drop back into the shell to use external tools (e.g., git, linters, formatters, debuggers, file tree manipulation, etc.) So my terminal emulator is already the main application. For this workflow the lack of a dedicated GUI is almost immaterial.

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