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by andyhoang 3340 days ago
What good of a built in terminal? Thanks
3 comments

In Emacs the shell-mode allow me to use the shell as any other buffer, with random access and scrolling. I can cut and paste stuff just like in any other text buffer, manipulate the output of my session to save it to some file / send it to someone else, etc. IDK how it is in nvim but I'm quite pleased with shell in Emacs, can't go back at all. Though if you're using tmux or maybe screen you can probably do similar things.
The Vim :sh is much more limited. I actually kind of stopped using it a while ago because it the workflow was so jarring, especially on Windows.

Neovim's :terminal is from what I can tell more or less equivalent to Emacs's shell.

I'm not sure I understood your question. This is the terminal: https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html

If you're asking what good is a built in terminal, well, there's plenty of scenarios. One I'm facing right now is using GVim on Windows. Have you ever seen what happens when you type !dir in GVim, right now? It's really ugly.

I don't use it as a terminal. However, it makes things like fzf integrate quite nicely with neovim. The later looks and interacts awfully in vim.