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Comment by shadowofneptune | Hacker News Reader

With the Emacs shell, this goes a step further. Emacs functions and /bin/ commands are put in the same namespace. '+' is now a command that can be run at the command line, while 'grep' can have its output redirected to a buffer instead of a file (Sadly no input redirection). This, all while itself being a buffer.

It doesn't work well with full-screen programs, or ones that use escape sequences. Sadly there's no away around that besides keeping a list of those programs. Unix programs have never needed to say to the OS "I am a fullscreen program" due to how little a traditional shell actually interacts with a programs.

Emacs is my login shell now. I feel however that other, more pure attempts at this like the Canon Cat and Plan 9's text editor were smothered by the Mac/Windows interface of GUI programs which rarely interact. A more evolved shell never had the chance to arise.

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I've mostly ditched tmux for emacs shells. I wrote a quick script that gives me tmux like shortcuts for tagging and switching to different buffers. This allows me to start several shells and move between them with simple "Alt-Fn" shortcuts. The split screen modes and copy paste are so powerful I find myself opening emacs just to use the shells even when I don't have any need for a file editing buffer.

wow, I've used emacs for a gazillion years and never thought to replace screen/tmux with it. I think I'll start now, thanks to your comment!

I still use Screen/TMux to run servers, or any process that I need to keep running for a long time and still maintain control over it's STDIN/STDOUT.

But now that I use Emacs "shell-mode" I hardly ever use Screen/TMux anymore. I don't even use Bash anymore, I switch my default shell to Dash, because I don't need Bash's tab-complation in Shell-mode. I use Emacs's tab completion instead.

I run tmux in vterm in emacs rather than multiple vterm buffers because as awesome as emacs is it still crashes or just becomes unusable with enough uptime. This way I can bounce emacs without losing my terminals.

That's quite funny. I've ditched the terminal for vim with split screen, for pretty much the same reason that you are using emacs - quicker to shift between shells and copy/paste become so much more (also, searching command history is not intuitive).

Here's my shell script for vimterm.sh:

    vim -c 'call Tmux()'

And here's the relevant function from my .vimrc:

      function! Tmux()
         vsplit
         terminal
         set nonumber
         wincmd j
         q
         wincmd l
         terminal
         set nonumber
         wincmd j
         q
      endfun

I never really set up a function for it, but what I usually do is in a new vim instance, I'll run the :term command, press ctrl-w o to make it the only window and then run a nested vim instance in that term window (typically one instance per vim tab). I'll open new terminals by running :tab :term.

Basically, I'm using one instance of vim as a session manager to run other programs in, including vim itself. You can pass ctrl-w to a nested vim instance by pressing

    ctrl-w .

> You can pass ctrl-w to a nested vim instance by pressing

> ctrl-w .

Huh, never knew that; thanks :-)

> It doesn't work well with full-screen programs

eshell, at least in the past, is quick to involve ansi-term (M-x ansi-term) when launching a program that requires it. I recall being able to run Emacs inside of Emacs circa 2008, not sure if things have changed since then.

There's also eshell-vterm[1], which allows eshell to use vterm for visual commands.

[1]: https://github.com/iostapyshyn/eshell-vterm

I haven't tried eat (Emulate A Terminal) yet, but I've been meaning to: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat

Eat is an terminal emulator supporting eshell, written in elisp. It also supports full screen programs. It claims vterm is 1.5x faster, though, but that eat doesn't flicker while vterm does.

I haven't noticed vterm flickering, or maybe I just don't notice?

I've tried out eat a bit, it does also have something similar to eshell-vterm (for visual commands), but, obviously, in eat. My limited experience is that: (a) vterm doesn't feel like it flickers to me; (b) vterm still also feels faster than eat.

Thanks, I'll give eshell-vterm a try.

That's what I meant by keeping a list, didn't expand on that much. It's something that needs to be configured per-program, which is an issue.

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