Hacker News Reader

Do you lose any of Emacs' advantages/capabilities/features when you run it in terminal mode (emacs -nw) instead of windowed?

View on HN

Yes. You lose the ability to perform certain key chords (which happen to be default). Terminals do not distinguish between upper- and lower-case control keys, for example.

Thanks, but what you and hkolek are saying sounds contradictory. Are case-sensitive key chords critical, and losing them borks its workflow?

Bascially I want to give Emacs a shot, but using Evil-mode b/c I love Vim's modal edititing, but I also like working in terminals (I do a lot of remoting to cloud servers).

I guess I should just give it a shot and see how it goes.

Not to my knowledge. I always use Emacs in terminal mode even when I have a window system available and I have never encountered anything that would only work with a GUI. I think there are some extensions that work only with a GUI but that's not an inherent limitation of Emacs and there are usually a ton of alternatives.

Auctex mode gives you graphical previews of your LaTeX documents. That would be hard to do in a terminal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com