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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I for one really appreciate how Emacs can run in a terminal, over SSH, with almost no feature-degradation at all.

Besides Emacs being a very nice programming (and programmable editor), this is one the key features which keeps me from even considering other more "modern" options.

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You may be in the minority in terms of the total number of users, but most of the Emacs developers will have the same mindset. Terminal-friendliness is a part of Emacs tradition. The developers would surely keep the ability to run Emacs in a terminal.

Yep, I agree. Modernization efforts (a modern emacs) should be attempted on products under a new name.

With adequate separation of concerns the backend could either be V as full Dom or as a terminal friendly minimal DOM (no css fonts attributes, pixel positioning, box shading etc).

Exactly right! I spend tons of time running Emacs over ssh. This is a major value add of Emacs. The -nw option is our friend :-)

I haven't used Emacs in a while, so I'm very rusty, but why would you run a remote Emacs in SSH, and not use your local Emacs to access remote stuff via TRAMP?

In my Emacs days, I've never really used the terminal version. Multiple frames, yay!

On my remote systems, about the first thing I do after a reboot is call "emacs --daemon" via SSH and then use emacsclient to edit files. For one thing, TRAMP has higher latency, and it also keeps state across disconnects and reboots of my desktop system. I regulary have lots of configuration files open, tail-mode buffers to watch log files, an eshell session, man pages, web pages (using w3m), and it is just too much of a hassle to open these all over again all the time.

Also, if you have to access the remote machine through a low-bandwidth line, the terminal version at least feels more efficient than using TRAMP from my workstation. For most purposes, the GUI does not offer that much of an advantage.

Some people run their dev environments on remote linux machines (VPSs), it makes them OS agnostic, you just need a ssh client, while tramp is awesome, imo not using it gives you a faster and more streamline workflow.

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