I’m running a little experiment. Even though I recently realized that I hardly ever use a terminal emulator, I was intrigued by this shoutout to the eat terminal emulator package. Except for the usual ankle biters, who don’t appear to have even used the package, the comments were all very supportive, some even saying that it significantly enhanced the commenter’s workflow.
I checked the README at the project’s GitHub repository and I was again impressed. It’s pretty speedy considering that it’s implemented in Elisp. It has several modes. One of those modes lets you move around the buffer and use the usual Emacs editing commands. That’s something that’s missing in vterm so it seems an improvement.
Installing eat is a simple one step process using the package manager. After that, you simply invoke it with Meta+x eat to start a terminal.
As I said, I don’t use terminal emulators very much anymore but I am going to try to use it as much as I can. I still have to refer to the README for the keybindings but I’m sure they’ll soon be absorbed into my muscle memory. There is, in any event, a manual (also available in Info) that covers everything. I’ll report back later with my impressions after I gain a bit more experience with it.