this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Emacs
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@paequ2@lemmy.today "Emacs" will launch a new instance of Emacs, while "Emacs (Client)" will connect to an already running Emacs Server – unless Emacs takes a long time to start up you may not notice a difference.
Doom and Spacemacs are predefined configurations for Emacs that include many additional packages and custom settings, all of which you could manually add to your own Emacs configuration if you had the time and patience. They both include a range of opinionated decisions about what packages to include and how Emacs should look and feel, which may or may not suit you. I don't use either of them, but if you're coming from Vim you might find them interesting because they provide a similar modal editing experience.
Oooooh, ok. Thanks for breaking that down.
What about Emacs GUI vs Emacs TUI? Do people run Emacs as a terminal app? Or is the typical way of running Emacs as a GUI app? How's the shell integration with the GUI app? Normally, I like staying in the terminal.
I haven't been TUI only for roughly two decades now - that's around the time the server got properly usable.
I typically have a daemon running - on Linux via systemd user session, on MacOS via launchd, on Windows via startup. I then attach GUI frames to that, and - at least on the unix style platforms - typically have a tmux with a TUI frame running.
I have scripts to open files in emacs - that's easy configurable to either open in the last used frame, or attach a TUI frame in the terminal, and open it there. I also have the EDITOR variable set to those scripts.
When fully using emacs you'd probably end up doing more work in emacs, and only occasionally wanting to do shell call outs.
For example, I edit some project, commit it via magit, trigger a build via compile to pack things up, open dired to move the files to a publish location, then open dired at the publish location and modify the publish package from there, and then finally start a shell in that directory to trigger the publish workflow. Only slight annoyance with that is that out of the box emacs shells are not setup for that kind of multiple shell buffers in specific directiories with easy throwaway - but it's easy enough to make that work.