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I am going to sound like a mouse-using Luddite but I configure .emacs with a one line addition to allow a mouse click to reposition the cursor and fast scrolling works also.

I have been using Emacs for 40 years, and decades ago, before ground based fiber, it was a 2 satellite bounce ping time between my office in San Diego and the 38 data collection sites around the world for a DARPA project and the mouse click in Emacs saved a ton of time.

In the present time, I use Emacs on remote servers and local editing, either using my iPad Pro, and Apple Mouse, and a Studio monitor, or a MacBook - on both environments I find occasional mouse clicks or fast scrolls using mouse or Apple trackpad still saves time even in zero latency environments.

3 comments

> fast scrolling works also

Grokking efficient navigation within Emacs buffers completely removed the necessity for scrolling for me - most of the time it's all about finding specific content - using consult-line, imenu, various jump methods, ex-commands, etc. - there are so many different tools in Emacs to rapidly move around, it makes scrolling feel like useless fiddling, not efficiency.

Mouse is nice for operations that don't require exact precisioning - like resizing windows in your WM, or another cool albeit pretty rare and gimmicky use for it is setting mouse clicks for multiple-cursor selection - feels like shooting lasers in a video-game, i.e.,

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-s-<mouse-1>") 'mc/add-cursor-on-click)

Selecting regions of text with mouse? Why, if vim-navigation lets me quickly grab: anything between things - parens, brackets, quotes, etc.; anything including those things; anything up to the char; including the char; until some text; backwards up to the text, etc.

With expreg (expand-region) I can quickly expand and contract my selection - it's so smart - it first selects the word, then line, then sentence, then paragraph - similarly it expands/contracts structurally for code, it understands org-mode, yaml, markdown and Lisp structure. After developing the muscle memory for these things, selecting and moving text with the mouse feels so crude and annoyingly inaccurate. Makes me feel sorry for the vscode kiddos to be honest.

Tramp isn't an option? I know people say it's slow (it is) and synchronous (yes, it is) but I'd rather pay a high latency cost only upon saving than a moderate one ALL THE TIME.

It is an option. You are talking with an old man (me!) and I just usually like simple Emacs setups, also using mosh and ssh and tmux.

How do you go about editing via ipad, I'm just getting into this whole world, and am finding it difficult to figure out a system.

I use an app like Terminus or Prompt to access a remote server. I have a keyboard and a mouse for my iPad Pro.