:-) I'm not sure if we're talking about the same terminal. M-x term is a terminal emulator that acts like xterm and obscures all the great emacs stuff. I thin

:-) I'm not sure if we're talking about the same terminal. M-x term is a terminal emulator that acts like xterm and obscures all the great emacs stuff. I think that thing blows. M-x shell is a fully-featured shell that also happens to be a normal buffer. When you cat binary data to it, it just displays binary data (as control characters, most often). I usually have to use quote (C-q) to, for instance, send a KILL to the running process (C-q C-c RET). On the bright side, if I change my mind, I just delete the C-c before I hit RET and type something else. I'm not just talking about re-replace in history (although yes it has that, along with M-/ (for me, hippie-expand) to complete with arbitrary text from any open buffer in Emacs). I am talking about manipulating the input/output by just editing junk in the buffer. For instance, I get 10000 lines of output and just clean it up or select a region, then run a ten-line function I wrote in elisp to do some calculation on the data, in the shell buffer, without copying it anywhere else or otherwise disrupting my flow. And I never have to touch my mouse to do it. This is the real promise, that any useful integration you do for one part of Emacs applies to every part of it, without having to learn a new set of bindings or the weird indirections you get out of combining screen plus the terminal plus the command line sql interface plus... And there are many many useful libraries that have come out over the years.