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Comment by jedbrown | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here use M-x term? Is it stable?

I've been put off by M-x shell because it only offers "line" interaction, so bash tab completion doesn't work. M-x term looks much better, but "ls /usr/bin" stalls the output part way through with my cursor off in the middle of the screen until I type a character in char mode, and I see stuff like

  error in process filter: cd-absolute: /hom/: no such directory
  error in process filter: /hom/: no such directory

in messages. Is this sort of thing endemic?

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Bash tab completion works for me in shell. GNU Emacs 23.2.1, x86_64-apple-darwin, on OS X 10.6.4.

Term works fine as well.

M-x shell, then type

  git <TAB>

Is it completing subcommands, or is it trying to complete file names (I always observe the latter)? Now type

  alias foo='cd /'
  foo
  ls <TAB>

See how it tries to complete paths in ~ (or wherever your last path was instead of in the new directory).

GNU Emacs 24.0.50.1 (Linux), and every version of Emacs I've used in the last 10 years.

git <TAB> completes filenames, but so does bash in terminal. I don't have any fancy bash completion dingleberries installed. (And yes, my beard is grey too.)

The alias completion does appear broken, as you demonstrated.

  git <TAB>

completes subcommands

  ls <TAB>

with the alias shows files from the root /

GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (Linux)

Are you using shell-mode or something else (e.g. term-mode)? Completion works fine in term-mode (in term-char-mode) because it actually uses bash's completion mechanism. In contrast, shell-mode only does line-based interaction with the shell, and it generates its own completions. It recognizes commands like cd, pushd, and popd to maintain its own mirror of the current path. As far as I know, there is no shell-mode implementation that actually calls the shell for completions.

multi-term (term-char-mode/term-line-mode)

What you're seeing is not bash tab completion based on compgen, but shell-mode's implementation of tab completion. Which is why git <TAB>, for example, does not do what you'd like. It seems like it should be possible to write an emacs tab completer that actually calls bash's compgen, but I'm not aware of an implementation of this.

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