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I never understood the need to do everything in Emacs either. I love Emacs, and I use it for all kinds of things, but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too and

I never understood the need to do everything in Emacs either. I love Emacs, and I use it for all kinds of things, but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too and it seems silly to have to choose one or the other. Calling shell commands from Emacs and inserting their output into a buffer is great, don't get me wrong. But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. At the end of the day, I use the tool I'm most comfortable with and does a good job. Sometimes that's Emacs, sometimes it's not. Maybe if I hadn't spent 20 years in the shell before picking up Emacs I'd feel differently.

noufalibrahim 1y ago
I agree. I do have a bunch of aliases that allow me to send the output of a command into an Emacs buffer, that open a file, open a file as root, open a file on a specific line and things like that which smoothen out the flow. However, I'm much more comfortable in the Emacs+Terminal environment than in pure Emacs.
michaelcampbell 1y ago
> But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. [lib]vterm reduces this paling to almost zero.
- spauldo 1y ago
  vterm is great - I had it in my config for a while and it's hands down the best way to put a terminal in Emacs. But for me it's the whole "encapsulate a terminal in Emacs" concept that I find unuseful. That's a personal preference though - I've been used to having dozens of xterms scattered around my desktops for longer than I've been using Emacs, so that's just more comfortable for me. I'll use regular ol' shell occasionally when I just need to throw around some commands but for anything that needs a real terminal emulator I just open another xterm.
eschneider 1y ago
There _used_ to be a huge advantage to pulling everything into emacs rather than having to background emacs, do whatever, then bring emacs back into the foreground. With multiple windows or multiplexers like tmux/screen, it's a lot less necessary, but still nice.
Barrin92 1y ago
>but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too well, the big advantages start when you aren't in the UNIX ecosystem. One of the biggest benefits of using Emacs and Eshell heavily for me is, I have it on a Windows machine.
- spauldo 1y ago
  That's true, although I find that if it's a machine I'm going to be using for a while it's easier to go the WSL route and run Emacs from there.

noufalibrahim 1y ago

I agree. I do have a bunch of aliases that allow me to send the output of a command into an Emacs buffer, that open a file, open a file as root, open a file on a specific line and things like that which smoothen out the flow. However, I'm much more comfortable in the Emacs+Terminal environment than in pure Emacs.

michaelcampbell 1y ago

> But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. [lib]vterm reduces this paling to almost zero.

spauldo 1y ago
vterm is great - I had it in my config for a while and it's hands down the best way to put a terminal in Emacs. But for me it's the whole "encapsulate a terminal in Emacs" concept that I find unuseful. That's a personal preference though - I've been used to having dozens of xterms scattered around my desktops for longer than I've been using Emacs, so that's just more comfortable for me. I'll use regular ol' shell occasionally when I just need to throw around some commands but for anything that needs a real terminal emulator I just open another xterm.

eschneider 1y ago

There _used_ to be a huge advantage to pulling everything into emacs rather than having to background emacs, do whatever, then bring emacs back into the foreground. With multiple windows or multiplexers like tmux/screen, it's a lot less necessary, but still nice.

Barrin92 1y ago

>but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too well, the big advantages start when you aren't in the UNIX ecosystem. One of the biggest benefits of using Emacs and Eshell heavily for me is, I have it on a Windows machine.

spauldo 1y ago
That's true, although I find that if it's a machine I'm going to be using for a while it's easier to go the WSL route and run Emacs from there.