Today I learned that (TILT) I could edit the .emacs file to start emacs with the various modes turned on.
The default emacs setup that comes with my system (macOS) lacks certain features. The mouse and mouse wheel are not used, there is no word wrap, etc. So I dug through the emacs brain dump via Google and found the following .emacs [^1] modifications:
(xterm-mouse-mode t)
(mouse-wheel-mode t)
(global-visual-line-mode t)