Copy/Paste in emacs ansi-term shell

Question

I have configured my emacs to run zsh shell within ansi-term. However, copy/paste no longer works i.e. nothing is getting pasted from kill-ring to the terminal. Changing the TERM to vt100, or eterm doesn't solve the problem.

Would appreciate any ideas or solution.

To provide context I have configured ansi-term as follows:

(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")))

Thanks
Sandeep

Answer 1

ansi-term, in char-mode, takes the ordinary bindings for the terminal emulation. You need a new binding, plus a way to output to ansi-term correctly. I use this:

(defun ash-term-hooks ()
  ;; dabbrev-expand in term
  (define-key term-raw-escape-map "/"
    (lambda ()
      (interactive)
      (let ((beg (point)))
        (dabbrev-expand nil)
        (kill-region beg (point)))
      (term-send-raw-string (substring-no-properties (current-kill 0)))))
  ;; yank in term (bound to C-c C-y)
  (define-key term-raw-escape-map "\C-y"
    (lambda ()
       (interactive)
       (term-send-raw-string (current-kill 0))))
  (add-hook 'term-mode-hook 'ash-term-hooks)

When you do this, C-c C-y will yank. It only does one yank, though, and you can't cycle through your kill-buffer. It's possible to do this, but I haven't implemented it yet.

Answer 2

You may want to simply switch between character mode and line mode while using the terminal. C-x C-j will activate term-line-mode, which treats the terminal buffer more like a normal text-buffer in which you can move the cursor and yank text. You can switch back to character mode with C-c C-k.