[kkfx]

Personally, while living in Emacs (EXWM), I still can't live on eshell, the issue is "the terminal", too many commands are simply uncomfortable to use in eshell while run smoothly in a real terminal.

I've also tried some new shells, the one I last more is xonsh, but generally I came back to zsh even if I use in general much less the shell than before thanks to Emacs, the 2D shell.

Emacs completion also it's very nice for text, but slower than tab-cycle in zsh as well and for quick commands that's matter.

[MarsIronPI]

Have you tried Eat[0]? It's a reasonably fast terminal emulator that integrates with Eshell so that all commands run in Eshell have full terminal emulation (but they're still run in the original Eshell buffer, which makes it better than `eshell-visual-commands'). I haven't had any terminal emulation problems since switching to it.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat

With regards to completion, I use corfu, which gives me nice inline popups. I use the bash-completion package, so I don't have issues with programs that don't provide Eshell completions (which are basically all of them).

[kentrado]

This is extremely helpful. I have never considered the possibility that there could be a better method to deal with emulation than visual commands.

You have no idea how much this helps me.

[karthink]

You have to turn on eat-eshell-mode to enable Eat's terminal emulation in eshell.

It runs full-fledged TUIs like vim and ncmpcpp in Eshell slowly, but is good enough for quick fzf uses. It's perfectly fine for "small" dynamic elements like the spinners and progress bars used by package managers.

Just remember to use system pipes (with "*|") instead of Elisp pipes (with "|") if you're piping data into an interactive TUI application like fzf in Eshell.

[goku12]

How does eat detect a visual command in eshell? I use vterm in Emacs for visual commands like nvim and htop. But it's triggered manually with a simple custom prefix command (just 'v') added to the actual command. I wonder if that trigger could be automated. It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat. If so, a similar automatic trigger for vterm could be very beneficial.

[karthink]

There's some miscommunication here.

> How does eat detect a visual command in eshell?

eat-eshell-mode doesn't detect visual commands and launch a separate eat buffer, like eshell-visual-commands do. It filters all process output in eshell and handles term codes. It turns the eshell buffer itself into a terminal, so that vim or whatever runs in eshell.

> It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat.

vterm is faster than eat, but a dedicated eat buffer is fast enough for most common TUIs. An eshell buffer with eat-eshell-mode is slower.

[skydhash]

Visual commands only differs from normal commands by the escapes code they use (like enabling the alternate buffer, clearing the screen,..). Eshell can't deal with those (and shouldn't as it's a shell, not a terminal). Eat adds a layer that does process those escape codes and that's all you need to handle visual commands.

[onetom]

i second the eat package recommendation.

there are some quirks with it though, given it has a couple of input modes.

i think everyone should read its fantastic documentation 1st to avoid frustration, instead of just falling back to the local minima of trying to use their pimped up shell inside eat as is.

e.g. i had a 2 line starship prompt enabled in my macOS zsh and inside eat it made the screen scroll back and forth by half a page randomly as i was just typing regular characters at the prompt.

M-<left>/<right> moves the Emacs point in semi-char mode, but the underlying shell is not aware of it, so the next character input will happen at an incorrect position. M-f/b works though.

There is an auto-line-mode, which might be a good compromise, but i haven't tried it yet.

[klodolph]

I agree with the assessment about eshell. I use eshell for one thing only—quick terminal sessions in the same directory as the file I'm editing.