Re: page-at-a-time output for M-x shell

[Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>]

On 2009-07-13 13:42 (-0700), Samuel Wales wrote:

> I read the whole thread, and I am surprised at how thoroughly and
> repeatedly the OP was misunderstood.

Then I'm certainly one of those. Sorry about that, Francis.

> I think what he wants is shell mode (not term) but to have some sort
> of less-like solution (not less itself) for paging output. Page up and
> prompt search and term in line mode are all good ideas, but he
> probably tried them.

Hmm, speaking speculatively, would it be some code in shell.el (or much
likely comint.el) which stores shell commands' output in an intermediate
hidden buffer or some Lisp data type and then pages it to *shell* buffer
for user? I'm pretty sure that that would be possible to implement.

From quick glance it looks like comint-output-filter is the function
which handles the output that's coming from shell commands. The function
is called automatically when Emacs sees data coming from an external
process. I can see no pager features there but that's the place to start
for someone who's interested. Split the functionality: have the output
filter function write directly to hidden buffer and implement another
output function which moves content from hidden buffer to *shell*
buffer, possibly page by page.

> It doesn't seem like he's so wrong for merely asking how to do that or
> whether it is possible.

I agree with that. Assuming I'm finally understanding what is being
asked. :-)