This right here. Emacs actually supports graphical output (X11, Cocoa, Win32). Additional bonuses include: Esc is actually Esc; you can bind Ctrl+Shift or Cmd; you can use more than one font at a time; you can display a picture; change the shape of the cursor... It's like a time machine that takes you 20 years forward - into 1989.
There is, however, considerable upside in having all the same key bindings whether you're in local UI (maybe using tramp) or ssh to a remote server. Tramp has limitations and is a bit clunky so I use it rarely.
Clipboard integration and mouse cursor support are the two reasons I generally break out emacs-ui (my shell script for it), otherwise it's emacs-nox, generally.
Yep. I just tune the 16-color palette in Terminology (it's an INI file) to my preferred theme for the same styling in the console and terminal applications (vim).
Yah, I do pretty much the same thing. The default colours are far too dark for the dark background, so I just increase the luminance of all the colours.
In my ~/.Xdefaults for rxvt-unicode:
And in my custom theme .el: I then use these to set various faces etc.As a bonus, colored `ls` output etc. is nicer too. The raw 16 color palette is too saturated and often has bad contrast.