Problem Applications in eshell

If you’re like me and try to stay in Emacs as much as you can, you have probably tried eshell. It’s a nice Emacsy shell (Mickey has an excellent eshell tutorial you should check out) but can sometimes have problems with applications that do direct cursor addressing.

It turns out that it’s easy to teach eshell to run such applications in a term buffer so that things still work. The most common examples of such apps are less and top (at least for my workflow). All you need to do is tell eshell to treat these applications specially and everything works just fine.

The TL;DR is that you should read Mickey’s tutorial and set eshell-visual-commands to run problem applications in a term buffer.

UPDATE [2016-10-04 Tue 14:33]: At least in Emacs 25, it turns out that eshell-visual-commands is already defined to a reasonable default list. You may want to add to it for other problem applications that you discover.

UPDATE [2016-10-05 Wed 12:07]: shell –> eshell

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