Terminal Velocity: Eshell, vterm, and Eat

• Judy (jvdydev) has joined Crafted Emacs as a co-maintainer! https://jeffbowman.writeas.com/crafted-emacs-update-for-july-and-new-teammate

• Denote 2.0 has been released!

  https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-07-21-denote-2-0-0/

• Submit your EmacsConf 2023 proposals!

  https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/

• I’ll be out for 2 weeks! No streams in that time, August 4 and 11th

If you’re an Emacs fan and haven’t been using it as your terminal of choice, you’ve been missing out!

In this stream, we’ll take a look at three different options you should consider for a terminal (or terminal-like) experience in Emacs:

• Eshell
• vterm
• Eat

We will experiment with these three options to see which one gives the best results based on the following factors:

• Speed
• Terminal emulation quality
• Efficiency/ease of use

We’ll quickly try to come up with a decent configuration with each of them and then experiment to see what kind of results we get!

• Nice prompt editing experience
• You can run Emacs commands from the shell prompt
• Easy redirect of command output to Emacs buffers
• Supports Windows and emulates Linux-style shell commands in that environment!

• Not a full POSIX shell so some things work differently (subcommands, piping, etc)
• Output can be really slow for some things like ls on large folders. (Though you still can drop through to the real commands with *ls etc
• It’s not a terminal emulator, so terminal programs don’t render correctly (though you can use eshell-visual-commands to defer specific programs to term-mode)

• Great in terms of speed and terminal emulation completeness
• You can use Emacs inside of Emacs (but not easily)
• You can use vterm_cmd inside of your shell to invoke Emacs commands

• Requires some extra Bash (or other) shell configuration to make it blend with Emacs more effectively (directory tracking, key bindings, etc)
• Not easy to have separate modes for passing through certain keys directly to the terminal app
• Tricky to use with Evil Mode
• You need some compiler dependencies to use it on most systems!
• It doesn’t support Windows

• Does not require compiled components
• Does seem to emulate the terminal pretty well
• Better key binding modes to control how keypresses get sent to the terminal
• Handy eat-project command

• Have some issues with the cursor jumping upward when using TAB for completions (sometimes)
• Not as fast as vterm, but still not bad
• Also requires some shell integration, but it’s easy to set up, pretty much automatic (directory tracking, etc)

• You can run full terminal applications from within Eshell!
• You still have full integration with Emacs, no shell integration scripts needed on the Eat side
• You have full Emacs-driven prompt editing and display

• You still aren’t using a POSIX shell (Eshell) so you might get confused and expect certain things to work like Bash (subcommands, piping, etc)

Note: It’s possible to do something similar with vterm and the eshell-vterm package: https://github.com/iostapyshyn/eshell-vterm

(use-package eat
  :ensure t
  :config
  (eat-eshell-mode)
  (setq eshell-visual-commands '()))

~/.emacs.d/eshell/alias

alias ls *ls $*
alias cp *cp $*