Getting Emacs ansi-term and Zsh to play nicely

Question

I've been trying to use Zsh within my emacs session, without emacs remapping all the Zsh keys. I found ansi-term works pretty well for this but, I'm still having some problems. I was getting lots of junk characters outputted with, I was able to fix it with:

## Setup proper term information for emacs ansi-term mode
[[ $TERM == eterm-color ]] && export TERM=xterm

But everything still doesn't work perfectly. Now I am having trouble with output being drawn offscreen , especially when using something like C-r for search.

Any thoughts. Anyone else have Zsh + Ansi-term working properly?

Answer 1

Hmmm. I don't think I've ever seen any fancy editing work out well within ansi-term, although I haven't tried it in maybe 20 years. I'll just ask, in passing, if you've tried shell-mode (M-x shell) as it's a lot more natural with EMACS anyway.

That said, reading through the term.el file, it kind of looks like ansi-term is doing a lot of manging of its own. you might want to look at the term raw mode code, starting around line 1230, at least in EMACS 22.3.

Answer 2

I figured it out. It was an emacs config problem. This bit of elisp in my .emacs was causing it:

(custom-set-variables
 '(fringe-mode nil nil (fringe))
 '(fringes-outside-margins t t))

Thanks for the help.

Answer 3

False alarm, that didn't fix it. What I found is that it works fine if you don't resize the window. I can reproduce it like:

1. Launch a clean emacs -q
2. Start ansi-term and use zsh
3. Make window fullscreen
4. Output something that fills the screen
5. Type C-r
6. The prompt will be off the screen

Maybe there is some way I can make the space between the output and the minibuffer larger to compensate for the overshoot?

Answer 4

I was looking for this as well for quite a while now. For me adding following to the

;; ansi-term

(global-set-key "\C-x\C-a" '(lambda ()(interactive)(ansi-term "/bin/zsh")))
(global-set-key "\C-x\ a" '(lambda ()(interactive)(ansi-term "/bin/zsh")))

works. I picked this from http://svn.assembla.com/svn/id774/scripts/dot_files/dot_emacs.d/elisp/global-set-key.el .

I am sure there are other goodies in that script. As an added bonus screen seems to play nicely with emacs for me.

Hope this helps.

-Sandeep