Re: page-at-a-time output for M-x shell

[Teemu Likonen]

On 2009-07-13 02:16 (-0700), Francis Moreau wrote:

> On Jul 13, 10:21 am, Teemu Likonen <tliko...@iki.fi> wrote:
>>
>> OK, then it's probably me who fails to understand why do you keep
>> talking about "M-x shell" when you need a terminal. This
>> "page-at-a-time" feature comes with terminal emulation. There's no
>> need to make "M-x shell" a real terminal because there already is
>> one: "M-x term".
>
> Ok then it's probably me who fails to understand the point of "M-x
> shell"...

The documentation says "Major mode for interacting with an inferior
shell" (C-h f shell-mode). It's like repeated M-! but more convenient.

> If "M-x shell" implements this 'page-at-a-time' feature, does that
> mean it becomes a real term emulation ?

To make "less" work it needs some terminal features so it would heading
towards that direction, that is, towards term-mode which already exists.
Perhaps someone could write some custom pager system in shell-mode but
it still wouldn't make "less" work.

> Is it really that much hard to make "M-x shell" mimics the one page at
> a time ?

You can write to emacs-devel mailing list and ask. I don't know.

>> Is there something wrong with "M-x term"?
>
> Not really, but I found it not very well suited to be used inside
> Emacs: the key bindings are not very friendly with the rest of Emacs
> and sometimes the output is screwed, I dunno why. So it's not very
> integrated to Emacs, and I just prefer start another term outside
> emacs if I want a real term emulation.

If you can present the problems in a clear way you could report them as
bugs, with "M-x report-emacs-bug" command. I don't use term-mode (nor
shell-mode for that matter) much but I have successfully tested Mutt
email client, Vim and Emacs itself inside term-mode, with no problems.
What comes to key bindings I have changed the escape char to C-x:

    (add-hook 'term-mode-hook 'my-term-mode-hook)
    (defun my-term-mode-hook ()
      (term-set-escape-char ?\C-x))