Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)
32 points
3 days ago
| 6 comments
| howardism.org
| HN
pvdebbe
1 hour ago
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The biggest strength of Eshell, for me, is that I can maintain some sanity in Windows environments (with or without WSL). In linuxland, it's a tougher sell. Compared to term-mode and the others, Eshell hacks better and I can fine tune my tab completions. The best thing is that my keybinds integrate better across all emacs modes when I use eshell.
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fainpul
2 hours ago
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> with EShell, you don’t need to bother with a pager, since if you received too much information, hit C-c C-p which jumps you to the top of the last command, and then C-v your way down. Or better yet, just search for what you want.

Cmd+Up - jumps you to the top of the last command

Cmd+F - just search for what you want

I don't need no stinkin' Emacs

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msla
18 minutes ago
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Ctrl-R to search for previous command, which I use more often. Pretty ergonomic if you do the normal Emacs thing and rebind Caps Lock to Ctrl, ironically.
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wging
5 hours ago
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fhd2
3 hours ago
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I never could get used to different key bindings. vterm in Emacs, with a few workarounds, works beautifully for me.
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m463
6 hours ago
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I tried using shell mode in emacs, but my fingers use control-p and control-r on the terminal shell and I fail.

instead of searching backwards in commands, it does it in the buffer.

How do people deal with this?

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qazxcvbnm
6 hours ago
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M-n, M-p. M-r for searching on past commands. C-c c-n/C-p for next/previous prompt. C-c C-r to scroll to focus on output.

Having switched recently to Emacs, my current issue is how to get Emacs shell history saved properly for my other shell buffers, and getting completions from shell (not Emacs) to work, planning to try MisTTY soon.

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MarsIronPI
4 hours ago
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I've retrained muscle memory to use C-c C-l (which I rebind to `consult-history'). This gives me a fuzzy-searchable list of all my history. I find that I prefer this to a normal shell's C-r, because with my vertical completion setup I can see multiple matches for my search simultaneously.
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ulbu
3 hours ago
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remap the keys?
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kkfx
6 hours ago
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Personally, while living in Emacs (EXWM), I still can't live on eshell, the issue is "the terminal", too many commands are simply uncomfortable to use in eshell while run smoothly in a real terminal.

I've also tried some new shells, the one I last more is xonsh, but generally I came back to zsh even if I use in general much less the shell than before thanks to Emacs, the 2D shell.

Emacs completion also it's very nice for text, but slower than tab-cycle in zsh as well and for quick commands that's matter.

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MarsIronPI
4 hours ago
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Have you tried Eat[0]? It's a reasonably fast terminal emulator that integrates with Eshell so that all commands run in Eshell have full terminal emulation (but they're still run in the original Eshell buffer, which makes it better than `eshell-visual-commands'). I haven't had any terminal emulation problems since switching to it.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat

With regards to completion, I use corfu, which gives me nice inline popups. I use the bash-completion package, so I don't have issues with programs that don't provide Eshell completions (which are basically all of them).

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kentrado
4 hours ago
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This is extremely helpful. I have never considered the possibility that there could be a better method to deal with emulation than visual commands.

You have no idea how much this helps me.

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karthink
4 hours ago
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You have to turn on eat-eshell-mode to enable Eat's terminal emulation in eshell.

It runs full-fledged TUIs like vim and ncmpcpp in Eshell slowly, but is good enough for quick fzf uses. It's perfectly fine for "small" dynamic elements like the spinners and progress bars used by package managers.

Just remember to use system pipes (with "*|") instead of Elisp pipes (with "|") if you're piping data into an interactive TUI application like fzf in Eshell.

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goku12
3 hours ago
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How does eat detect a visual command in eshell? I use vterm in Emacs for visual commands like nvim and htop. But it's triggered manually with a simple custom prefix command (just 'v') added to the actual command. I wonder if that trigger could be automated. It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat. If so, a similar automatic trigger for vterm could be very beneficial.
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karthink
40 minutes ago
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There's some miscommunication here.

> How does eat detect a visual command in eshell?

eat-eshell-mode doesn't detect visual commands and launch a separate eat buffer, like eshell-visual-commands do. It filters all process output in eshell and handles term codes. It turns the eshell buffer itself into a terminal, so that vim or whatever runs in eshell.

> It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat.

vterm is faster than eat, but a dedicated eat buffer is fast enough for most common TUIs. An eshell buffer with eat-eshell-mode is slower.

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klodolph
6 hours ago
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I agree with the assessment about eshell. I use eshell for one thing only—quick terminal sessions in the same directory as the file I'm editing.
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