Re: perks about telnet mode

[Miles Bader]

"Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier@nortelnetworks.com> writes:
> I've tried it out, and honestly can't see anything that it offers over
> an xterm and a shell.

[note, the following comments are for `shell-mode' and `M-x rlogin'';
I don't actually use telnet-mode]

Well, here's a few things off the top of my head:

  1) The ability to easily edit and browse the output

  2) Infinitely better editing for the command line than that offered by
     bash etc. (I like bash's emacs-style editing too, but compared to
     the real thing, it's a joke)

  3) Easy hackability -- e.g., I have hooks on `comint-output-filter-functions'
     that that watch for a password prompt and prompt without echoing
     (to address one of your criticisms), and another that looks for
     login: prompts and automatically fills in my userid when it sees them.

     These sorts of things are _easy_ to add using emacs comint mode;
     good luck hacking xterm to do them.

  4) Pretty colors for my prompts.  :-)

     [I hate `ls --color', but if you like it, you can use the
     `ansi-color' package to add it to comint (to address another of
     your criticisms)]

  5) All my terminal sessions sit in emacs buffers, where I can switch
     to and from them without leaving emacs.  This is a _big_ win if
     you're a typical emacs user.

> I have no idea how to permit the remote shell to do filename completion in
> C-Shell or Bash.

This is the one real problem I have with shell mode (although it's not
really such a big deal for me, because most of the filesystems I use
are nfs mounted from common servers; mostly it just bites when
completing program names).

> It permits me to backspace past the prompt.

Well, don't do that!  [hint: if you're holding down the DEL/backspace
key and using auto-repeat to delete things, you're not using emacs very
efficiently...]

It would be easy enough to make the prompt read-only, but there's been
no real reason to (and sometimes, you _want_ to delete things from the
buffer, e.g., to clean up from some mistake before saving a terminal
log).

-Miles
-- 
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