Re: Mysterious hidden end of line characters.

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

David <dpleydel@univ-fcomte.fr> writes:

>
> Ha ha, I thought someone might spot this. After 2 years of emacs use I
> still have one or two newbie feathers lerking in my plummage. I do use
> *shell* buffers alot, but there is some terminal functionality which I
> do not have.
>
> Examples of commands in a *shell* buffer which for me don't work as in
> a terminal include
>
> 1) shell_prompt:~$ man pwd ## (or any other command), this gives
> something rather unfriendly in emacs. Only today did I discover M-x
> man was the proper way to do this. Nice feature, but rather
> non-evident to the newbie. Why is *shell* not totally equivelent to a
> terminal?

The command M-x shell gives you a 'dumb' terminal. This means any
program that relies on terminal IO to display correctly wil fail. for
programs like this, use M-x term. 

>
> 2) shell_prompt:~$ grass ## Similarly to typing man at the prompt, the
> lack of terminal functionality used to prevent me from passing the
> terminal based setup page. I recently discoverred the solution (for
> older versions of GRASS) was to add a flag specifying a GUI setup
> page. Also updating to more recent versions appears to avoid this
> problem. So now I am finally using GRASS in emacs (horrah!).
>

Again, M-x term may be a better solution. Of course, you could just
write a special grass-mode and stick it up on emacswiki :)

> 3) shell_prompt:~$ mutt ## Similarly, I cannot find a way to navigate
> my mail boxes using mutt inside emacs. Emacs just isn't displaying
> anything that would normally appear in the terminal apart from when I
> hit q it asks if I really want to quit - of course I do, I can't see
> anything! The best I can do is to run mutt in the terminal, pass to
> emacs to write messages and pass back to the terminal to handle
> attachments etc. What am I missing?
>

I think there may be amode out there for running mutt in emacs. However,
maybe switch to a native emacs mail client. If you use IMAP, you could
use one of the many emacs mail clients that support imap and then when
your not in emcs, you can use mutt and still have access to all your
mail. There are also interfaces to gmail. 

> 4) shell_prompt:~$ su ## I never like moving to super user in emacs
> because the password appears on screen as I type it. So all
> administration is terminal based for me. How to hide passwords as a
> terminal would?
>
I don't get this problem using M-x term
I also use tramp to edit files owned by others from within emacs
i.e. /root@localhost:/path/to/file

Use M-x shell only when you want to execute simple line oriented
programs that don't need things like ncurses or formatted screen IO. 

finally, if your someone who likes to use lisp at the shell level and
have nice integration with emacs, have a look at the emacs shell - type
M-x eshell

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au