Re: WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

[lawrence mitchell]

Irving Kimura wrote:

> I find it infuriating that M-x shell does not give me a fully
> functional bash (or rather, a fully functional terminal).  For
> instance, I can't pipe things through less ("WARNING:  terminal is
> not fully functional").  And /bin/ls --color results in gobbledygook.
> Etc.

> Of course, my main reason for using M-x shell is to be able to
> treat stdout as any other Emacs buffer.  (In particular, I find it
> very useful to be able to easily copy selected chunks of stdout to
> another Emacs buffer.)  Is this capability fundamentally antithetical
> to a "fully functional terminal"

No, but the way Emacs interacts with the external shell,
claiming to be a dumb terminal, is.  I think.

> that would allow me to pipe outputs through less, run /bin/ls
> --color, run man, run top, etc?  If not, is there any way to
> configure Emacs so that M-x shell operates under a "fully
> functional terminal"?

For the ls --color, you need to do M-x
ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on RET, or add it to some hook.  This
will then correctly parse the colour escapes.

Regarding the others, there would seem to be no need to pipe
things through less when running a shell inside Emacs.  After
all, the Emacs buffer has scrollback anyway.  I can still use
less within an Emacs shell buffer, it just doesn't work that
well.  For man pages, you could try M-x man RET, which reformats
man pages for viewing within Emacs.

I'm not sure what to do for top, I think there's an interface to
it somewhere, but I can't remember anything less vague than that.
> Thanks!!!

>       -Irv

-- 
lawrence mitchell <wence@gmx.li>