Regarding your first point, do you mean that you try running emacs inside a tmux inside a terminal? If that is the case, I would recommend not doing that. The

Regarding your first point, do you mean that you try running emacs inside a tmux inside a terminal? If that is the case, I would recommend not doing that. The emacs gui will give you more colours, images, thinner window borders, better keyboard shortcuts (eg a difference between C-m and RET), mouse controls (if you ever want them), as well as potentially less lag. The analog to the vim-in-tmux workflow is to instead keep emacs always open in the gui, run somewhere between none and all shell commands from emacs (depending on how you feel), and have a terminal in another window (as you might for web browsing or email) for more prolonged terminal things. One might skip this somewhat by running shell (or even term-mode) in emacs. Similarly, for editing remote files one uses tramp to ssh from inside emacs and edit files whereas with vim one sshes into the remote box and runs vim.