[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.