color ls in shell or eshell or ...

[Joerg Schuster <js@cis.uni-muenchen.de>]

Hello,

I would like to have a color ls in shell mode or some other
(equivalent) mode. I found a 1999 talk between "pJ" and John Wiegley:


pJ> I have my linux system setup to use color coded output from "ls".
pJ> WHen I start a shell in emacs, and do ls, the output is filled up
pJ> with garbage (the color coding syntax, I imagine.).  If you know of
pJ> a way to fix it, let me know!

jw> There is no easy way to fix this in shell mode.  There are, however,
jw> two things you can do to get color ls displayed in Emacs.

jw>  #1  Use term.el.  This is very easy to do.

jw>      Just type `M-x ansi-term`, RET, RET.  You will now be in a shell
jw>      buffer that support most of the ANSI escape sequences.  It can
jw>      even be used to run vi from within Emacs.

jw>  #2 Use Eshell instead of shell-mode.  It has it`s own implementation
jw>      of ls which does full coloring.  It is a bit more difficult to
jw>      setup than running ansi-term, but it is no more difficult to use
jw>      than shell-mode.

My problem is:

1. M-x term causes my emacs to crash. (Btw, it is the only way I know
   to cause emacs to crash.)

2. There is an eshell manual
   (http://www.emacswiki.org/johnw/eshell.html), but I couldn't deduce
   from it how to configure eshell such that it is sufficiently like
   other shells. I just cannot run most of the programs in eshell. One
   example:

   ~/cl1/skript $ pdflatex ./skript.tex
   This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-1.00b-pretest-20020211 (Web2C 7.3.7x)
   (./skript.tex
   Error: pdftex (file pdftex.cfg): cannot open config file
   ~/cl1/skript $ 

   Maybe eshell doesn't know the right paths?

I would prefer eshell to other solutions. Can anybody help?

Thanks,

Jörg