
Overall, I’m starting to appreciate Evil mode, especially motion, visual mode, and the z and g prefixes. Indeed I added a lot of custom shortcuts under my leader key, see below. By the way, which-key is such a nice add-on, I wish it exists long before when I started learning more advanced Emacs shortcuts. Finally I made them all available via the leader key ( SPC) in Doom, so that s-&, which means “switch to the next workspace” in GUI mode, becomes SPC-& when I run Emacs in a Terminal. This is handy since I’m used to use, e.g., ⌘-F to search for some expression, or ⌘-S or ⌘-W to save or close a buffer (which are not really buffers in other macOS applications, but that’s another issue). When in GUI mode, I have a lot of keybindings involving the command key on my Macbook.
#EMACS TERMINAL FOR FREE#
As a bonus you get font ligatures for free under iTerm! On the contrary, if you only want to quickcly revise an existing project, or create one from scratch, while staying at your preferred Terminal application, emacs -nw is quite good actually.
#EMACS TERMINAL PDF#
So, to answer the original question I think it all depends: If you want a full-fledged Emacs, you should probably run it in GUI mode, so that you will also enjoy reading your PDF files right into a separate buffer when editing your Org file. Surely I cannot browse the web as easily as when using Safari or xwidget in Emacs, but that’s okay, especially when I don’t need to browse the internet. Sometimes, I feel lazy or in retro mode and I only want to run a Terminal on my Mac. I should note that as I use Doom emacs, many things are already configured the right way (linter, checker, spelling, project management, etc.). I know I have dired and vterm available withing a few key presses, and that’s really all I need in addition to Emacs editing facilities. When working on projects, I use Emacs, exclusively. Startup time, ease of text manipulation, you know. For quick editing of text files, including writing micro-posts or Git commit messages, I tend to use Neovim. And this makes a huge difference! What else? Well, I think it depends on the intended usage. I can have the same rendering of font and color in GUI and terminal mode. Later I discovered that you can have a 24-bit mode for terminal applications, and you just have to prefix the invocation of your preferred command with env TERM=xterm-24bit, once you have installed the corresponding terminfo stuff. I guess my main complaints were the lack of support for 24-bit colors (while iTerm supports them), which means tweaking your default theme or adding a lot of if/switch statements. At one point I was using Emacs almost exclusively from iTerm, then I got bored or something like that and switched to GUI mode only. Also, there are compelling arguments about why it is probably better to run Emacs in a GUI: generally this amounts to displaying images, using OS specific or extra keybindings not available in tty (unless you use xterm, rxvt or iTerm, but it’s cumbersome to remap everything), but there are probably some other subtleties that I never noticed besides posframe which is quite great. Use C-h i to open the Info viewer it starts you out at an index of all available manuals.I know this has been debated at large on the web, and there are already excellent threads on Reddit regarding the use of Emacs in terminal vs.

You can also read the Emacs manual, and potentially many others, while inside of Emacs.
#EMACS TERMINAL MANUAL#
You will want to read chapter 38 Running Shell Commands from Emacs in the Emacs manual for more information about shell, eshell, term and a few other related topics. The terminal emulation is compiled into a loadable module rather than being written in Emacs lisp, so it is faster.
#EMACS TERMINAL INSTALL#
If you are willing to install packages, then vterm is a good one. The one downside here is that most Emacs keybindings are altered while in this mode, so that you can operate ordinary programs that expect a wide variety of inputs. Term will let you run a shell (or any other program) inside a terminal emulator. shell runs your normal shell, while eshell runs a shell made entirely in Emacs lisp, with better integration with the Emacs internals (for example, you can redirect the output of a command to an Emacs buffer, as well as to a file). Shell and eshell will both give you shells with no terminal–emulation at all. Which you will prefer depends on your precise needs. Yes, there are many, and several of them come with Emacs.
