> Emacs is not primarily a TUI program (although it does have a TUI with the -nw). The TUI version of emacs lacks visual customizability and introduces unnecessary overhead (terminal!). Use the GUI.
Can you elaborate on this? I tend to use emacs exclusively in the terminal, since I'm often using them on remote workstations. For remote workstations, I can (a) open files using TRAMP, (b) open a remote GUI with X11 forwarding over SSH, or (c) open a remote TUI. TRAMP doesn't always play nicely with LSP servers, and remote TUIs are much, much more responsive than X11 forwarding.
Locally, the performance of emacs depends far more on the packages I load than on the GUI vs TUI, so I'm interested in hearing what overhead there would be.
Yes, emacs is equally performant in GUI and TUI. And frames can be opened in both GUI and TUI on the same socket.
For me, TUI is a dealbreaker because:
- No mixed-pitch support: I use mixed-pitch fonts in org-mode buffers and in outline faces in prog-mode buffers. And fonts are just plain nicer on the GUI, and it's much better to look at.
- No SVG support: (I might be wrong about this) I have a custom modeline with SVG artifacts and the artifacts fail silently on the TUI
- Keybind conflicts: I am not used to accounting for the terminal's keybinds. Also, I use xfce4-terminal, which does not support the Hyper modifier (which I use extensively).