[misterm]

What about running a command prompt from within emacs? I spawn one in my .emacs file with: (shell).

[wglb]

Do you mean in order to run git from the command line within emacs?

(Within each emacs instance that I have open, i have at least one shell window open, if not two.)

[misterm]

Admittedly, there seem to be better solutions out there, but I suppress the "start" page in my .emacs file and start with an empty scratch buffer, or a shell prompt instead. I can just switch the buffer to use the prompt.