Making the Most of Terminal Emacs

News

Emacs in the Terminal is Useful!

  • Why using Emacs in the terminal can be useful
    • Installing Guix
    • Desktop environment gets broken and you need to fix it in the tty
    • ssh’ing into a remote machine or container
    • WSL2 Linux environment in the terminal
    • Termux on Android, probably the best Emacs experience on mobile right now
  • How to minimally configure Emacs to be slightly nicer to use in the terminal
  • Emacs vs tmux
  • Use Emacs as the program that gets launched automatically on tty login

See also Wai Hon’s blog post https://whhone.com/posts/emacs-in-a-termainl/ – especially about clipboard integration!

Check out Lionyx’s configurations too:

https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo/blob/main/init.el#L309 https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-kick/

The Final Configuration

(setq inhibit-startup-message t)
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(fido-vertical-mode 1)

;; Alternatively, use this:
;; (icomplete-vertical-mode 1)
;; (push 'flex completion-styles)

;; -------- UNNECESSARY --------

(tab-bar-mode 1)

;; Unnecessary Emacs Lisp editing enhancements
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'flymake-mode)
(global-eldoc-mode 1)

;; Unnecessary visual improvements
(load-theme 'modus-vivendi-tinted t)
(setopt mode-line-end-spaces nil)
(set-display-table-slot standard-display-table 'vertical-border (make-glyph-code ?│))

;; Make the infernal rodent work!
(xterm-mouse-mode 1)