emacs [LWN.net]

emacs

Posted Jun 5, 2004 12:38 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: emacs by ibukanov
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

emacs is generally a lousy terminal emulator in terms of ansi terminal compatibility. IIRC it is also relatively slow.

One interesting atvantage it has is that the whole buffer of the terminal is searchable just like any other emacs buffer.

It is also the base of modes like the useful sql mode (in case you have to work with an sql server with bad command-line support, such as Oracle or DB2)

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emacs

Posted Jun 7, 2004 11:07 UTC (Mon) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

emacs is generally a lousy terminal emulator in terms of ansi terminal compatibility. IIRC it is also relatively slow.

This is half-true: emacs' M-x shell in no way aspires to ansi terminal compatibility. Why should it? You have M-x term for that :)

One interesting atvantage it has is that the whole buffer of the terminal is searchable just like any other emacs buffer.

IMHO the most wonderful thing about emacs' shell is that it gives you full command-line editing for any program you happen to be running in the shell, not just when you are at the shell prompt. This for me outweighs by far the disadvantages most of the time (yes, it can get very CPU intensive if a program dumps megabytes of output to the terminal).