Re: weird emacs shell behavior

[Emilio Lopes <eclig@gmx.net>]

Joel J Adamson writes:

> What's the difference between shell-mode and a terminal emulator?

`shell-mode' is a mode for running a command interpreter (in most
cases a shell) in an Emacs buffer.  All Emacs commands are available
and work as expected: pressing "C-p" will move the cursor to the
previous line, "C-w" will kill the region etc.

In the terminal emulator you can run *any* terminal program, be it a
shell, a mailer or even VI (forgive the heresy!).  How the keybindings
behave is dictated by the program running in the terminal.

If you want to run a terminal program like "trn", "less" or "lynx" you
have no option but `ansi-term'.  For running a command interpreter
`shell-mode' offers you the best of both worlds: you can run your shell
*and* have all Emacs text manipulation facilities at your disposal.

Note that in shell-mode the command line editing provided by the your
shell (e.g. "readline") is not available; "shell-mode" provides it's
own command line editing facilities.

-- 
Emílio C. Lopes
Munich, Germany