[ataylor284_]

I don't run emacs in a terminal emulator. Emacs is my terminal emulator. All my terminal programs get run in a (graphical) emacs shell-mode buffer. The rare program that needs full screen control uses term-mode.

It's not the most featureful or fastest terminal emulator, but I can jump around the buffer like any other buffer and seamlessly access it along with the other content I'm editing.

On a remote computer where I can't run a graphical emacs, I either remotely edit files via tramp, or run a headless emacs server process and connect remotely with a graphical emacsclient.

[radarsat1]

I also use emacs graphically, somehow I managed to switch after years of using it in the terminal and now I prefer it. However, I've never managed to settle on any of the terminal emulation modes. Just too many keyboard shortcut conflicts and complicated magic to remember how to copy and paste between different types of buffers.

These days I've pretty much settled on having and emacs window and GNOME Terminal side by side as my two main work windows, and it's pretty comfortable. I like that I can mouse select and copy from the terminal window and then C-y into emacs and vice versa.

If I really have some need I might still open a shell or ansi-term session but it's pretty rare now. Sometimes it's convenient when I find myself in a remote shell session and want to have a text editor and shell vertically tiled, I'll just run emacs with ansiterm because for the life of me I can't ever remember the screen keyboard shortcuts for splitting windows.

[ghosty141]

Could you explain the part about the headless emacs server? I thought emacsclient only worked locally.

[ataylor284_]

It's been a while since I've run with that configuration, but setting the variable server-use-tcp to non-nil enables it. On startup, the server creates a file with the connection details that emacsclient can consume. I think it just works if the filesystem is shared between client and server machines but command line options allows the use of a copy on the client.

[hollerith]

I do that, too, for the reason you describe, except instead of shell mode, I use a mode I wrote myself.