Re: Interactive programs and dumb terminals (emacs shell)

[Pascal Bourguignon]

"john maclean" <jayeola@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey Chaps,
>
> I've been using M-x shell recently and getting the hang of the
> difference between this shell and say /bin/bash.

What difference?

Here,  M-x shell RET echo $SHELL RET
prints: /bin/bash


> My question is in the cases where one installs a program (via say
> apt-get -y install foo) which then prompts you for some configuration
> settings. The emacs shell is a "dumb terminal" as I understand it and

You are understanding wrong.

The shell is the shell, and the terminal is the terminal.  Two
different unrelated things.

The shell program run under M-x shell is most probably /bin/bash,
unless you've configured another shell.

The terminal emulator run under M-x shell is emacs, and emacs is
nearly dumb.  (There are emacs and dumb entries in termcap).

The dumbness is in the lack of cursor movement control sequence for
the emacs (and dumb) terminal emulators, (and unless your activate M-x
ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on, lack of color, blink, etc).


> interactive programs that use ncurses won't work. 

Yes.

> Install latex, tetex or xorg and you'll get asked system
> settings like your resolution, paper size etc.
>
> How can I over come this? ( Hope that this is all clear).

M-x term RET
or:
M-x terminal-emulator RET

Another possibility is  to use: xterm -display :0.0 -e apt-get install stuff &
in M-x shell.
You could even make an alias; put this in ~/.emacs_bash :

export TERM=emacs
export PAGER=cat
alias less=cat
alias more=cat
alias apt-get='xterm -display :0.0 -e apt-get'
stty rows 10000 coluns 80
echo '# Welcome to emacs shell'



-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

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