Re: M-x term on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Random832 <random832@fastmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 23:51:58 -0400
> 
> When I run M-x term in Windows, it doesn't work. If I let it run
> cmdproxy, it prints the startup message and prompt but accepts no
> input. If I run any other program (e.g. the interactive python
> interpreter), I don't even get that.

term.el in its present form cannot be run on MS-Windows.  It has too
much staff hardcoded that assumes a Posix shell in /bin/sh and a
terminal driver that supports Posix features like stty settings and
SGR escape sequences.  You _might_ be able to tweak it to work with
MSYS Bash instead, although even that could bump into basic
incompatibilities between MSYS and native Windows programs.  One other
gotcha is that on Windows, subprocesses are run via pipes, not via a
pty, so SGR sequences will probably never work, because a pipe fails
the isatty test, and the shell doesn't think it's connected to a
terminal, as it does on Unix.

Patches are welcome, of course, if you succeed in making that work.

> M-x shell is adequate for running command-line commands, but I would
> like a terminal to be able to run a ssh client (plink?) in.

Plink is a native Windows program, so it doesn't need 'term'.  You
should be able to run it from "M-x shell".

> I remember installing Git bash in C:\bin\sh.exe to try to make this
> work, but didn't follow up with doing anything about stty or /dev/null
> etc.

Git comes with a part of MSYS, but my suggestion is to install a full
MSYS installation, instead of relying on Git, because some parts might
be missing in Git (those that are not needed for running Git's
scripts).