3 ms·

If it "defecates if hooked up to a printer", it's not going to be useful in a Unix-style text pipeline, either. So, what benefit do applications like emacs or

If it "defecates if hooked up to a printer", it's not going to be useful in a Unix-style text pipeline, either. So, what benefit do applications like emacs or vim (which are, fundamentally, keyboard-driven GUI applications, even if they're running in text-mode) gain by being stuck in a terminal? It's a simple least-common-denominator that's easy to push over a slow SSH connection, but why wouldn't I want to relax some of those limitations when I'm working locally?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Vim benefits from being in a terminal because you can use things like tmux to improve its workflow. Terminal Emacs can be used like this too, but Emacs can also handle this by itself - its philosophy is actually the opposite. Emacs will consume the stuff you're doing in terminal, but in a much deeper way than other GUI editors/IDEs. Simple least-common-denominator SSH-style workflow is actually a feature for devops/sysadmins, so that's why I believe you'll find a disproportionate amount of them favouring vim. In Emacs, you can relax limitations of a terminal, while benefiting from its text-based design that enables heavy interoperability and ergonomic workflow (and then you discover that terminal Emacs retains 95% of those features anyway, so you can get them over SSH too).