You don't need a terminal emulator · Andrey Listopadov

The phrase &#x27;terminal emulator&#x27; is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Async-shell-command might not technically be a &#x27;terminal emulator&#x27;, but the author is sure using it as one typically would use a &#x27;terminal emulator&#x27;.<p>The article would make more sense if the author said &#x27;you may not need an interactive shell. Here&#x27;s how to use a pseudo-terminal-emulation mode in Emacs to launch commands without using a shell.&#x27;

I know many don&#x27;t care about that but I care about one thing: input latency &#x2F; lag. There have been many frontpage posts on HN about the subject of latency &#x2F; input lag (including when it comes to terminals) over the years.<p>I&#x27;ve got a CPU doing billions and billions cycles per second and a badass monitor. I want my prompt to feel instantaneous.<p>And although I&#x27;m a big Emacs user and although Emacs is nowadays one of the fastest editor [1] out there (compared to IDEs like VS Code &#x2F; IntelliJ or any Electron app), I don&#x27;t feel like any of ansi-term &#x2F; eshell &#x2F; libvterm solution feels low latency &#x2F; no input lag.<p>That&#x27;s why although you can pry Emacs from my cold dead hands, I still use terminal emulators outside of Emacs.<p>I&#x27;d say 99.9% of the reason to use a terminal inside Emacs is anyway to cut&#x2F;paste content from the buffer to Emacs: for that I use a shell script which pipes the output of my command into a new Emacs buffer.<p>[1] Time it takes to launch Emacs, execute Emacs Lisp code, and exit:<p><pre><code> $ time emacs -Q -nw -eval &#x27;(kill-emacs)&#x27; real 0m0.049s </code></pre> 49 ms.

I really like the fact that using the CLI that way feels very 3270-ish web-1.0-ish, that things move when you decide so and that things remain static for as long as you want.

Well, to each his own, but I&#x27;ve been using bash and vim for 99% of my technical work and it suits me very well. It&#x27;s going to be there on every box I can think of logging into, default config works fine in some cases (if they don&#x27;t I memorized the 6 lines of vimrc I need), and in 10 years with this workflow I&#x27;m still unsure how to install a plugin so it&#x27;s not like I need those anyway.

&gt; …if you’re an Emacs user, that is.<p>It shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise, given its relationship with Lisp based computers, and Emacs inspired IDEs in Lisp Machines, with integrated REPL.<p>Unless the shell exposes the whole OS stack like Fish or Powershell, a REPL is much more powerful.

Last time I checked all terminal emulators available in Emacs showed visible lag when rendering output. Not really suitable for serious work on the terminal.

Vim has a built in terminal emulator, but I have still yet to use it.<p>For me, the ultimate dev setup is really tmux plus vim (and other command line tools).

Um, yeah.<p>&gt; You don&#x27;t need a terminal! Look at all the stuff I do without one...<p>[...]<p>&gt; Oh, but, yeah, I totally use eshell + EAT.<p>&gt; Why do <i>you</i> need a terminal?