I genuinely never understood running Emacs in terminal, instead running terminal in GUI Emacs. That, until a day I joined a team where most development happens on remote EC2s, where people create joined tmux sessions.

Besides, it turns out, setting up emacslient for quick editing, or even for bringing up Dired to use as a directory lookup and switcher is also very nice.

There are dozens of us running it outside of a terminal. Dozens!

It's quite nice for the following reasons:

- Image previews (for file management with dired/dirvish)

- PDF viewing

- In-buffer images (e.g. profile pictures in git log with Magit)

- Browsing simple HTML pages (e.g. API docs)

There's probably more I've yet to discover.

M-X calc and/or imaxima with embedded Gnuplot generated plots.

I have used it between 1995 and somewhere around 2006, always as graphical application, and for a while mostly XEmacs, which had much better graphical features.

Using it on the terminal only over telnet when a remote X session wasn't possible.

My main interaction is from the GUI where I just leave it open for days at a time. So this article stems from some of the frustrations I had using it in the terminal and not finding the same behavior I was used to.

Using it in GUI mode, you’ll end up using the terminal inside Emacs!

And there's EXWM if you want to keep going. I guess people have also tried to set emacs as their init process.

Yup: https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

Well there's the GUI version. vim also have it.