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I use emacs `-nw` within tmux, on iterm2/3 on mac. There are several terrible problems with this setup which I've never bothered to lose a weekend to trying to sort out (don't misunderstand me: I have lost weekends to some of these problems, and I'm running out of spare weekends).

mac pbcopy/paste into emacs does strange and horrible things. Mouse and scroll-wheel integration roughly doesn't work at all. The list is long.

I also use terminal tools a lot (data engineering), so the terminal itself (and hence tmux) is an important part of my toolset. Meaning, I can't abandon the terminal. Nor do I want to -- as others have said, I have RSI issues with touchpads and mouse-clicking. Spectacle on Mac (or any actual tiling window manager on linux desktops) helps with that, but if I never had to touch a mouse/trackball again in my life, that would be awesome.

As others have said, I mostly want to use an integrated editor and get on with my job, rather than go down a half-century old rabbit hole of reading SICP just to tweak some editor defaults. Again, don't misunderstand me: learning LISP changed my life, man. But that's not the same as "can I enable rainbow delimiters for protobuf" (As an aside, Little Schemer is a much gentler intro to LISP, and also awesome.)

And since I know we're a community of people who get distracted by the next shiny problem to solve: please don't focus on trying to fix the list of issues I'm describing. That's not the point (and I have no spare weekends).




>Mouse and scroll-wheel integration roughly doesn't work at all.

emacs, when started with the -nw flag, has nothing to do with mouse gestures. The terminal emulator (iterm in your case) sits between you and emacs and does not pass mouse gestures to emacs.

Actually, to be painfully precise, there is a convention, which iterm and emacs might or might not use, by which iterm could conceivably pass the location of single left clicks to the emacs process, but, e.g., mouse drag events and scroll-wheel events never get passed.

So for example when the users drags the mouse, then presses Command-C, `emacs -nw` has no way of knowing the user did that, and if anything got into the system clipboard, that is iterm's doing, not emacs's.

Might I suggest `open Emacs.app` rather than `emacs -nw`? Except for a GNU or Emacs logo that can be suppressed by setting the variable inhibit-startup-screen to non-nil and except for a tool bar that can be suppressed by evalling `(tool-bar-mode -1)`, the result is indistinguishable from a terminal window to most Mac users, but has mouse and scroll-wheel integration.


Can Emacs.app act as emacsclient?


Yes.

To be precise, after `(server-start)` is evalled inside the Emacs.app process, whenever the command line `emacsclient <file name>` runs anywhere, inside or outside the Emacs.app process, the Emacs.app "visits" (opens) <file name>.




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