this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Emacs

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Being able to do emacs stuff in my terminal and terminal stuff in my emacs while sharing the same kill ring and other similar kinds of state.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I use M-x shell for most shell commands. This provides "infinite" scrollback, easy to grab output into the kill ring, etc. It's kind of like a temporary notebook (though easy enough to save). When I need a full terminal such as gdb -tui, I use a more traditional terminal emulator like gnome terminal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You mean "as opposed to using term.el" ?

Performance, mostly. (I'm still using term myself, but suspect I'll switch to eat at some point.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

None if you don't care for terminal emulation. You can use M-x shell and have a much better experience.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

I get your point. I messed with eshell for a while, then used vterm. In the end I just hard wired a swaywm key to a scratch terminal wihch toggles an alacritty instance. I can copy and paste in it fine : in short I find it easier to do "terminal shell things" in a "real terminal" but I can see why others prefer to stay inside emacs. Occasioanlly I'll use a terminal inside emacs via projectile as its quick to open a terminal at your current project location.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

I used both extensively but the both are faster than term or shell.
Vterm is the fastest and most correct about handling key events.
Maybe term will get similar improvement as vterm in the future. This is such a basic thing that most other IDEs also seem to support properly.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Use same keybinds as in other Emacs buffers to manipulate the text e.g. search, copy/paste, folding; matching theme; project context; etc.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

If you are a web developer, you will notice that modern toolchains tend to assume interactive terminal. Most of them can be run in compilation-mode, but some do not function without interactivity. For example, you will probably need a terminal when scaffolding a project using a CLI.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Fun thing is I'm currently using Emacs mostly for vterm, lol. I code in another app (works better on my current project), I've switched from org-mode to LogSeq (long story).

Well, ok, also magit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They are just another terminal emulator, not much else. So the point? Not much if you use emacs as just a text editor.

If you are more intergrated into the emacs environment there are features that you may find useful such as directory tracking. Worth checking out their project pages to see if they make sense in your work flow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Vterm or eat would be a must for EXWM users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Very good point, if all you have is emacs then a decent terminal emulator is a must.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Terminals are helpful?

It's not clear what you're interested in here. Why use a terminal in emacs as opposed to a separate program? Why these over eshell?...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Can you call external programs like GCC with eshell?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Why are people downvoting this question? OP seems legitimately confused.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Yes? It's a shell

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

I have this funny anecdote.

A remote system I was working on has a malfunction: taskbar dead; windows blocked; super-key did’t activate anything. I had just a Emacs window open.

I ran eshell and then “shutdown -r now” and the system restarted.

Great moment with surprised colleagues :-) it was 2020

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

So I can do terminal stuffs in Emacs, instead of having to open another terminal window

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Vterm: none that I can see

Eat: it's awesome, very good and fast and mouse input works out of the box

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I believe the EAT readme itself recommends vterm for particular use cases, like (if I recall correctly) needing an emulator that handles large volume of text streaming

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That does not justify 5000 lines of code

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

If you have to compare with vterm, it doesn't. Vterm has more features, faster and less buggy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

My weakest computer can fit twenty million lines of codes on it.

I'd say if anything, the usefulness of eat would justify a lot more. Thankfully doing one thing well lends itself to brevity, and storage is cheap

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

For me: To run commands such as brew.