The Different Shells Available In Emacs

[@infomatec]

The big advantage of Eshell : it's platform independent. I use it the same way everywhere (Windows, linux ...), it doesn't replace a real terminal, just for quick and simple tasks, but that's more than enough for me.

[@Alexis-hj6ci]

I use Eshell for commands what for some reason are execute very slow in vterm.

[@Mythologos]

Thanks for all the Emacs content! I just started using it recently and it's God's gift to writers!

[@DistroTube]

I too think that Emacs is woefully underrated as far as creative writing. In fact, it's one of the reasons I've stuck with Emacs over Vim. I'm currently working on a novel (not something I want to talk publicly about yet) and I've been writing it in Emacs with Org. I can't imagine using a standard word processor for such a task.

[@Mythologos]

@@DistroTube I'll never use a word processor for a novel again! Good luck with your novel! I went through that for almost 30 years, agents & everything else, it's a meatgrinder!

[@lorenzocabrini]

@@DistroTube I write training materials using Org. I'm not going to touch a word processor and all the other systems I've played with (LaTex, Asciidoc, DocBook, etc.) get overly complex at some point. I do quite like Asciidoc, but authoring with Org mode just beats them all. One of the many things I really like is that I can add TODO items directly into the text and let org-agenda help me find things I need to work on. It just makes the authoring process so smooth.

[@AndersJackson]

@@lorenzocabrini that was an interesting thing I not thought about. I might have used that before, but still not thought of mention and thus named and used efficiently.

[@Hellohellohello803]

But God doesn't exist...

[@auroradraco9974]

The more I see about emacs, the more I like it. I am already an emacs user but I feel like I know nothing about it. Thanks for covering these. I learn more about one of the most brilliant pieces of software out there

[@archertheo6898]

you all prolly dont care at all but does anyone know of a method to get back into an instagram account? I stupidly forgot my password. I would love any tricks you can give me.

[@ronnieowen1239]

@Archer Theo instablaster ;)

[@MichaelVash7886]

Will you change your channel name to EmacsTube? Glad to see it though as I'm trying to learn more about emacs.

[@DistroTube]

Eventually

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Emacs well smart! Score: 99.

[@lucminax]

The best thing about the inferior shell for me is that you can have the full range of your Emacs keybindings (with customizable completion, as with packages like `company) but still running your standard shell. Of course there's caveats but I still definitely have an use case for it. Terminal emulators like vterm are great for when you want a terminal emulator and all that comes with it and nothing more, but sometimes you just need some to run some shell commands and want to just type with utmost comfort. I haven't tinkered around a lot with Eshell yet, so maybe that takes over my use cases of the inferior shell sometime soon. I recommend looking into the `equake package, it's very neat for using whichever shell in Emacs.

[@marioschroers7318]

This is actually getting interesting...

[@KyrychenkoAnton]

Huge thanks for your videos, I believe one day emacs might be at least as popular as vim, I hate those purists that keep it kinda "elitist" tool, blaming people for using wrappers like doom emacs or spacemacs etc. Just wanted to point mb you didn't know or as a candidate for future overview of emacs theme - emacs actually have its own htop, "proced", I like it very much since I can map any command I want to whatever I want. And vterm (and ansi term) has "multi-vterm", so you can use it instead of tmux/screen. And mb you can look at perspective mode if you didn't already, it took me a while till I ended trying it and can't live without it now creating my own frames/buffers/windows for different things. Thanks again!

[@brandonlewis2599]

Yeah, I use the inferior shell useful -- mainly because it doesn't interfere with keybindings. No escape keys are required. The killer feature is being able to freely yank and paste to and from shell buffers, useful when, say, developing a shell script. Or when perusing documentation. The biggest limitation is the single shell instance -- if there's a way to start multiple inferior shell buffers I'd love to know. The main thing I use it for is running the program under development. For that it's helpful to know the CTRL-P/CRTRL-N history commands, which are different from typical readline.

[@nevoyu]

The more videos you make kf emacs the more I grow to admire those who use emacs. As well as learn how much I would never use in emacs.

[@AndersJackson]

You can do the change. Just on step, to make the decision. We got cookies. :-)

[@lucasteixeira5346]

Honest question here: unless you are using emacs as the window manager, what is the point to use a shell inside it? Why not to use a regular standalone terminal emulator? I’ve been using emacs for a while and I love it, but I really don’t get why people want to do everything inside it

[@DistroTube]

It's nice if you are copying and pasting between the terminal and other Emacs programs. It's also nice because you don't have to leave emacs. No need to switch back and forth between emacs and terminal since the terminal is now an Emacs buffer. I wouldn't do any big compilations or anything like that in the Emacs shells though. They are noticeably slower on big tasks. And not the most stable.

[@lucasteixeira5346]

Great, thanks for the reply

[@KyrychenkoAnton]

@@lucasteixeira5346 I actually was all way around once - I ran emacs inside terminal, and had tmux to handle multiplexing. One thing that made me understand that you actually should make other way around it vterm and multi-vterm. In vterm you have "normal mode" - by pressing key you turn terminal into emacs buffer and vice versa, and as for multi-vterm - its like imagine tmux + emacs, again with full control over shortcuts and emacslisp commands they spawn.

[@lucminax]

Manipulating text from shell operations becomes super comfortable overall. Also, if you're using the inferior shell or Eshell, there's the full range of customized keybindings you've got in Emacs at your disposal. Adding to that there's the incredible potential of Eshell which, aside from writing custom functions in Elist as was mentioned by Derek in the video, there's also many simple but powerful operations that get very comfortable, like redirecting text from a shell command to a buffer, reading a buffer as input, etc. I recommend seeing the videos "Introduction to Eshell" by Howard Abrams and "Emacs as my go to scripting language", also by Howard Adams, a talk at EmacsConf 2019

[@lucasteixeira5346]

@@lucminax nice, thanks for the tips. I’m definitely going to check this

[@matthewbryson3243]

dt, I noticed you have ls aliased for exa. You were considering using ls for broot. I'm not sure if you've mentioned it- I'm curious why you've stuck with exa

[@capability-snob]

`grep --recursive` is my favourite eshell demo - buffer for matching lines that takes you to the file when selected!

[@kernalpenguin]

3 min gang! (Emacs = My life pretty much)

[@ianpan0102]

I'll say this -- just use the shell that you're most used to, be it either bash or zsh or something else. If you're looking for the best terminal emulation in Emacs, just go with vterm. Nothing even comes CLOSE.

[@lorenzocabrini]

Out of pure curiosity, what does vterm do that ansi-term doesn't? I found ansi-term and it has worked for me, so I didn't have any motivation to look further. But I'm interested in knowing what the limitations of ansi-term are and how vterm solves these. I mostly do things from Emacs when I can. I use dired, magit, etc, so I don't spend a lot of time doing file management and git stuff from a terminal, so my use case may be too limited to see the benefits of vterm? Perhaps I'd even be best off with eshell, since it allows me to just use LISP. But it does feel like learning something new again and at my age, it's beginning to become a struggle.

[@ianpan0102]

@@lorenzocabrini To put it in a few words, vterm has a far superior rendering ability to ansi-term. For example, running the "top -u" command in an ansi-term buffer will mess up the texts, while vterm handles it easily.

[@tomasruzicka9835]

Hey DT, how did you get to coding if you are not (i assume) a programmer. How fluent do you find yourself in various languages.

[@clouddaemon4828]

hey DT, i have a noob question: In your xmonad configs you have xmobar launch on different X screens, with the -x 0, -x 1 flags. but I have to ask: how did you do that? like, did you edit your xorg.conf to have screen 0,1,2..? or did you do that in some other way?

[@DistroTube]

I don't play with xorg.conf at all. Simply telling xmobar to launch on monitor 1 (-x 0) or whatever monitor you choose is all you need to do.

[@clouddaemon4828]

@@DistroTube that doesn't work on me, like, it launches xmobar only on one monitor.. To be clarified: I use a Thinkpad with the monitor attached to a docking station; when i plug it i launch a arandr screenlayout via a key-binding, but if i reload Xmonad Xmobar goes on the second monitor, and xrandr's output says they're both under screen 0. Am I doing something wrong?

[@DistroTube]

I don't use a laptop attached to extra monitors, so I can't help you with this.

[@clouddaemon4828]

@@DistroTube I see. Thank your for your time nontheless!

[@DistroTube]

@@clouddaemon4828 Try asking the xmonad guys. They have a subreddit that seems fairly active. They also have a GitHub.

[@akojic5486]

In Exwm Emacs I use Xterm, the best of the best.. I use Emacs Xah-fly-keys in Xterm emulator

[@DistroTube]

Xterm inside Emacs? I can't say anything though since I launched Vim inside Emacs on this video.

[@akojic5486]

@@DistroTube can you send keybindings from Emacs to Vim through Exwm.. I'm thinking in future to that. For now I use Exwm to send fake keys to Android Studio, Netbeans, Firefox, Sql Developer, the power is unlimited..

[@copper4eva]

I was wondering if you could use vim inside of emacs. Instead of using evil mode, could you just setup vim as your text editor in emacs? Obviously you wouldn't have vim like key bindings for everything outside of text editing.

[@ezio934]

Opening vim in emacs is like removing the engine from car. All you have left is some extra utility.

[@npswm1314]

So if i was using Terminator could i use a shell to use it in Emacs?

[@yPhil]

Whoa! How did you get colored permissions in zsh ls?

[@eduardoantunes2958]

He's actually using exa. In his shells ls is just an alias to it. He mentioned this on his video about rust programs every linux should know if I'm not mistaken

[@pg051285]

how could you run the last command without switching to terminal window?

[@pb-vj1qs]

If the sky's the limit, why are there footprints on the moon?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

10:28 Not quite equivalent to Bash aliases, looks more like defining a Bash function. Functions do their own processing of the rest of the command line (kind of like in-memory shell scripts), while aliases only do a simple substitution of the command word (first word on the line), nothing more.

[@cunningham.s_law]

The feature I need the most that I cant find in emacs is a client server separation. I want to run an emacs server on my server and connect to it though an emacs clients kn my machine. my options are x forwarding. very slow. vnc. still slow. I would like something like whaat vscode remote extention does

[@DistroTube]

I don't know anything about VSCode. But in Emacs there is a program called TRAMP that lets you do remote connections. So you can ssh into a server and edit files from Emacs on your local machine. For a simple edit of a remote file, you can run find-file in Emacs (C-x C-f in standard Emacs, SPC-f-f in Doom Emacs) and then type: /scp:user@host:/path/to/file

[@pskry]

Awesome! Didn't know you could run vim inside emacs. It actually has a valid use case!

[@bobgrimes8618]

Just when I am getting comfortable using Xmonad!

[@AndersJackson]

You can/should continue to use Xmonad, you don't need to change to EXWM and run Emacs as a window manager. :-) And no, Xmonad is not a shell or terminal emulator, it is a Window Manager. That can start a terminal emulator that you can run a shell inside. It also can start Emacs and in Emacs you can start terminal emulators or shells. And eshell is a shell, not terminal emulator. (Sorry for the rant)

[@Pariatech]

I guess I have now to upgrade from ansi-term to eshell / vterm

[@lorenzocabrini]

I was contemplating so myself, but I've never really run into any major issue with ansi-term so laziness seems to have one the day, at least for now.

[@AndersJackson]

@@lorenzocabrini at least you know of alternatives, then you can do the change when there are a need.

[@lorenzocabrini]

@@AndersJackson very true. I'll keep vterm in the back of my mind and probably unlazy myself for long enough to give it spin.

[@kuhlekt1v]

Nice mug : )

[@닐리아담]

I don't think "inferior" is a reference to quality. IIRC, it means it's a forked process.

[@bullpup1337]

I guess its an ironic title, referencing the stereotype that emacs users are snobby elitists

[@sabinpocris6601]

I enjoy the unofficial emacs series

[@zeocamo]

4:30 do emacs do got a good text editor it can use Vim

[@lorenzocabrini]

Those who claim the Emacs is just missing a good text editor clearly haven't used Emacs as a text editor. Can we stop all the mythology about Vi being so well thought out already? Just like Emacs, it was written to solve problems that existed a long time ago. Both Vi and Emacs have managed to survive for a long time, so they must both have done something right. Which you use is mostly a matter of preference (in my case Emacs). You can make Emacs more Vi like, if you like and I'm sure there must be something to make at least Vim more Emacs like. I'm not sure why you would do that, since I assume you are going to use the editor you feel the most comfortable with. If I was more comfortable with vi keybindings, surely I would use Vi and not Emacs. I did use a Vi clone (elvis) for quite a few years. I also had a Vi clone on my Amiga, since MicroEMACS sucked and I couldn't be bothered to get any other Emacs working on it. It's against my religion to say anything negative about the Amiga, so you didn't read the following: the Amiga was lousy for working with text. It may have been a multimedia miracle machine in its days, but working with text was a real pain. At first I used the editor that came with SEKA, but it was so annoying to wait for the text to slowly render onto the screen. The vi clone I used (not sure which one it was, but it was not vim for sure), made it just a little more bearable.

[@zeocamo]

@@lorenzocabrini good you enjoy the emacs, that is great, the reason i don't like emacs is that it is not just a text editor, it is 5 terminals and 3 email clients etc. it is not a program that do 1 thing well, it try to do all the things as the only program you need.

[@lorenzocabrini]

@@zeocamo You are absolutely right, it's not just a text editor, it's just a form of LISP machine. At it's heart that's all it is: an environment to evaluate LISP code. All the rest grew out of that. I don't use 5 terminals and 3 email clients, I just use one of each, the others are there (which admittedly will add a bit of bloat, but doesn't kill me). There's also a bunch of stuff on my Arch systems that I never use, but they are there nonetheless. Vim of course doesn't come with 5 terminals and 3 email clients, because its scope is different. It aims at being just a text editor, which is what some people are looking for. But it also has its own issues. Long time users of vim know accept and know how to work around these issue, just like long time Emacs users accept and work around issues with our preferred environment. I have used Vim a bit, but as I've said before, the Vi clone I have the most experience with is an older one called elvis. I don't think it is still in development, since Vim became the default Vi clone for most people. I kind of liked it, especially for small editing tasks, but Emacs gives me so much more, especially the ability work write LISP to bend it the way I like. I don't have much experience with Vimscript, or whatever they call it, but from the little I have tried to work with it, I really didn't like it one bit. It's about as bad a javascript in my book, and that's saying something. You didn't say what your preferred editor is, but in any case, isn't it good that we can all choose what works for us? Happy you, happy me.

[@zeocamo]

@@lorenzocabrini i use NeoVim and VimScript is Bad, yes, but that is why NeoVim added Lua as it is close to c speed and is a good language to code in, so NeoVim can do all that Emacs can LISP in lua and if i want to i can make 3 email clients in lua too, but that is not what NeoVim is about, it is a damn good text editor and got all the features of the IDE that you need via plugins, but only the stuff you need, so there is not 5 terminal running in the background using resources, there is only 1. and you only got the git tools you use and only the LSP that you need etc. if NeoVim started to ship 3 email clients then i run away fast too :)

[@lorenzocabrini]

@@zeocamo I get you and I'm happy for you that you love neovim. I just don't think those terminals and email clients (which are not running in the background, merely taking up a little bit of space on my hard drive) are any more of a problem than /usr/bin/sordi, which I never use, have no clue what it is, but it's still there for some reason. It may be used by something I use, but then again, maybe it's just wasting 14K of my root partition. Who knows? The question is if neovim is going to do everything that Emacs can. I always thought there was a cultural difference between Emacs users (use Emacs for just about everything) and Vim users (Vim is for editing files, period). I don't know much about neovim or its community (hope its not one of those "let's reinvent it all in the latest silver bullet (Rust)" groups), but the Vim users I know are all very particular about that fact. They don't do anything that doesn't relate specifically to editing text in Vim. And I kind of like it that way. Vim and Emacs are two very different types of applications that appeal to two very different types of people. I sure don't want a bunch of Vim users coming to Emacs and screwing it up by demanding that Emacs should be more Vi like and I have no intention of telling Vim users (or neovim users for that matter) how their software should work. I stay on my side of the fence and expect you do the same. That way we all stay happy.

[@smeqwack7337]

I bet theres an emacs plugin to run emacs

[@masondear8016]

I mean, exwm if you think about it

[@CrustyAbsconder]

Hey Distrolovers, Today was an exciting day over in Fedora land. Rawhide is now on the 5.10 series kernel and the two backup kernels are iterations of 5.9 stable, and 5.9rc8. If you installed Fedora 33 Beta, then it is now on the final release version. That would likely mean a public release of Fedora 33 is about a week away. KDE has been updated in Rawhide to the latest KDE Frameworks. If you have a little experience with Fedora 32, then I don't think you will notice anything visual other than btrfs is the default file system. Lets all hope Gnome uses less memory and Wayland has improvements in both Gnome and KDE. The current packages of Rawhide will be upgraded and tested in the coming 6 months or so, and become version 34 of Fedora. That will be exciting, as will all the other distros publishing new stable versions, or improved experience of the rolling release versions. I used Rawhide during the entire development cycle of Version 33 as my only operating system and it never once crashed on me.

[@bigfootisjustreallyshy]

you should change the channel name to EmacsTube

[@zeocamo]

why do emacs have so many clearly broken term?? i think they should fix them so they work or just delete them ... no one will miss broken terminals ..... emacs is so bloated

[@AndersJackson]

That might be broken for your use case, but not for others. You could say the same for Linux. Why ware there so many broken terminal emulators (choose your favorite class of software)? Why not fix them or just delete them? Well I tell you. YOU can remove them from YOUR installation of Emacs or Linux, but YOU can't tell others what they should do with their software. UNLESS you pay them money to do that and they have accepted to do the work for the money you pay. Do you pay them?

[@zeocamo]

@@AndersJackson so you are saying that i can force people to do as i ask as long as i got money, .. i am not a slave owner and i don't think that it is ok to push to be slaves so .... no

[@AndersJackson]

@@zeocamo no, that is now what I wrote, and you know that. I think you are trolling, so I will not spend more time on this. Read again, and if you still get it wrong, ask, polite, and I might answer you if it isn't a troll statement.

[@zeocamo]

@@AndersJackson my point was in the video there was only 1 terminal that work at all all the other was useless .. as DT also show in the video, then you say linux terminals is broken ..maybe same is miss a feature or 2 but they are not broken like DT show in the video .. so that doesn't make sense to use here, what? Then you say i need to pay people to make them delete stuff .. why again make no sense .. i am not taking about i want to force people to change there system .. i think it wrong to force people you do stuff pay or not All i said was if you got 3-5 terminals in emacs that is broken this bad .. the people that is already making emacs, should fix the badly broken software or remove it so new user don't need to use a lot of time on broken software and maybe find emacs unusable... That is all

[@returned_to_monke8872]

@@zeocamo agreed. The terminal emulation is utter trash and laughable. "it doesn't replace a real terminal, just for quick and simple tasks, but that's more than enough for me." - one comment in this comment section by infomatec. If you don't wanna get out of emacs or spawn another window beside, then just use scratchpads like in i3, xmonad and dwm. That's much quicker and efficient terminal work on an actual fully fledged functional terminal that doesn't get seizures like ansi-term, eshell, vterm in emacs.

[@davidgomez79]

I'm a simple man who requires simple solutions. I'll stay stubborn and stick with neovim.

[@ezio934]

Yep emacs is not required for casual text editing. Its for programmers, writers and other text heavy uses.

[@davidgomez79]

@@ezio934 I code in C, C++ and assembly language for x86, x86_64, 6502, and 6805 I recently contributed source code to marco the window manager for mate desktop under my alias kungfubeaner so come again?

[@zeocamo]

@@ezio934 i been using Vim for 18 years for programmings in a Lot of languages, vim just work and i got all the features that your bloated IDE do, but only the ones that i use and i use neovim now, but you can join the fun, DT just show in this video that you can run a real text editor in emacs too, he started vim :)

[@AndersJackson]

Also a simple man with simple solutions. So I stick with Emacs.

[@davidgomez79]

@@AndersJackson How in the world is software that tries to be everything but your kitchen sink a simple solution? I need text/code editor that does its job and that job only. I guess we define "simplicity" in totally different ways.

[@_slier]

emacs shell is trash on windows.. damn it

[@TrueWordsOfEternity]

Firstttt