Palmer Cluff has an interesting post that makes the case for Emacs as a terminal-based IDE. We usually think of IDEs as having a GUI, lots of buttons and menus and of being mouse intensive. Cluff says it doesn’t have to be that way and that Emacs—even in terminal mode—can be a perfectly fine IDE.

His post discusses some of the packages that you’ll need to realize this and at the end he warns us to be ready to spend some time configuring our Emacs to make it the way we want it. Some people are put off by that, I guess, but I think of it as an enjoyable exercise in getting things just the way I want them. The key is that it’s an ongoing process not something that requires you to stop what you’re doing and devote a large block of time to configuring Emacs. I’ve been using Emacs for about 12 years and I’m still tweaking my environment regularly.

Cluff doesn’t make—or try to make—the case that you should prefer terminal Emacs over the GUI version. He merely says that sometimes—when you’re logged into a remote machine, say—it makes sense to use the lighter weight terminal version. Those of us who work with fast and reliable networks are incline to say, “Bah! Just use tramp.” but sometimes we’re using a slow network and the GUI version is just too painful. In those cases, it makes sense to SSH into the remote host and use a terminal Emacs, especially for small tweaks to a large file.

In any event, you’ll probably enjoy reading how Cluff gets his terminal Emacs as close as possible to an IDE.