0

I tend to prefer shell over term. With shell everything is text and I can use the Emacs bindings to move around.

Also, I have been trying to avoid opening my nixOS terminal. I have been trying to stay in Emacs as much as I can. However, executing htop on *shell* does not work. The image below shows what I get:

enter image description here

I was expecting what is been retrieved by the *terminal* buffer.

enter image description here

I feel I do not really understand terminal emulators in Emacs.

Why htop does not work in *shell*? Is there a way to fix this by tweaking my config file?

Improve this question
1
  • 2
    htop uses cursor-motion character sequences to place everything exactly where it wants. term interprets those characters as cursor motions and everything works; shell does not: it just inserts them into the buffer. IOW, shell provides only a "dumb" terminal that does not know how to interpret ANSI terminal escape sequences. Commented May 14, 2022 at 0:37

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

M-x term is a terminal emulator. htop needs a terminal.

M-x shell is only a shell, not a full terminal. Shell commands like ps will work but terminal commands like htop or vim will not.

I agree that shell is more convenient because it's just text, but you'll need a terminal to run terminal commands. When I do need a terminal, I use vterm over term but it's still inconvenient compared to shell.

Improve this answer
2

@NickD and @amitp answers are the correct ones making a distinction between shell and term.

As a side note, proced built-in command in Emacs is a good alternative for htop. But this point is unrelated to the terminal/shell discussion.

Improve this answer
1
  • 2
    I agree that proced is the right tool for the job! Commented May 15, 2022 at 15:12

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.