Shell layer

• Shell integration
• Running external terminal emulator in current/project directory

vterm is the latest addition to Emacs' set of terminal emulators and the only one to be implemented in C, leveraging libvterm. It is the only one in Emacs at the moment to be as fast as a standalone terminal with full support for ncurses, vim, htop and the likes.

On its first run, vterm will automatically compile its dynamic library, for which dependencies are needed. For more details, head to the official docs.

Emacs supports five types of shells/terminals:

• the Emacs shell (eshell)
• the inferior shell
• the terminal emulator
• the ANSI terminal emulator
• the vterm terminal emulator based on the C library libvterm

You can find a quick introductions to them here.

To define the default shell you can set the layer variable shell-default-shell to the following variables:

• ansi-term (default on Linux/macOS)
• eshell (default on Windows)
• shell
• term
• vterm
• multi-term
• multi-vterm

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-default-shell 'eshell)))

The default shell is quickly accessible via a the default shortcut key ~SPC '​~.

It is possible to choose where the shell should pop up by setting the variable shell-default-position to either top, bottom, left, right, or full. Default value is bottom. It is also possible to set the default height in percents with the variable shell-default-height. Default value is 30. You can also set a default width in percents with the variable shell-default-width, which has a default value of 30 and will take effect if your shell is positioned on the left or the right.

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables
           shell-default-position 'bottom
           shell-default-height 30)))

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables
           shell-default-position 'right
           shell-default-width 40)))

This layer supports opening an external terminal emulator using terminal-here. By default terminal-here finds an appropriate default shell for you. If this does not work please check the package documentation how to change it.

The default shell can be set by setting the variable shell-default-term-shell. Default value is /bin/bash.

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-default-term-shell "/bin/bash")))

The default shell can be set by setting the variable multi-term-program. Default value is /bin/bash.

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables multi-term-program "/bin/bash")))

By default the popup buffer spans the full width of the current frame, if you prefer to spans only the width of the current window then set the layer variable shell-default-full-span to nil.

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-default-full-span nil)))

From the em-smart documentation:

The best way to get a sense of what this code is trying to do is by using it. Basically, the philosophy represents a blend between the ease of use of modern day shells, and the review-before-you-proceed mentality of Plan 9's 9term.

In a nutshell, when em-smart is enabled point won't jump at the end of the buffer when a command is executed, it will stay at the same command prompt used to execute the command. This allows to quickly edit the last command in the case of a mistake. If there is no mistake and you directly type a new command then the prompt will jump to the next prompt at the end of the buffer.

To enable em-smart put the following layer variable to non-nil:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-enable-smart-eshell t)))

Comint mode (Shell mode) has good support for Evil mode as it inhibits movement commands over the prompt. This has the added benefit that Evil mode functions work sensibly. E.g. you can press cc in normal state i.e. evil-change-whole-line to kill the current input and start typing a new command. In Eshell you also kill the prompt, which is often unintended.

By default this layer also protects the eshell prompt. If you want to disable this protection you can set the variable shell-protect-eshell-prompt to nil.

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-protect-eshell-prompt nil)))

Making fish shell to work with ansi-term may be a challenge, here are some pointers to save you time to setup your environment correctly.

First be sure ~/.terminfo is setup correctly by running:

tic -o ~/.terminfo $TERMINFO/e/eterm-color.ti

You can locate the eterm-colors.ti file with:

locate eterm-color.ti

Then setup your fish configuration file (usually at ~/.config/fish/config.fish)

# emacs ansi-term support
if test -n "$EMACS"
  set -x TERM eterm-color
end

# this function may be required
function fish_title
  true
end

Finally you may need to toggle truncated lines for some prompts to work correctly, in the function dotspacemacs/user-config of your dotfile add:

(add-hook 'term-mode-hook 'spacemacs/toggle-truncate-lines-on)

If you want its window to close when the terminal terminates, set the following layer variable to non-nil:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((shell :variables shell-close-window-with-terminal t)))

This is only applied to term and ansi-term modes.

By default, the vterm and multi-vterm packages will be installed and configured on platforms that support it. However, this requires performing additional compilation steps at load or install time, and may require other external dependencies that may not exist on your machine.

If you do not wish to use these packages, you can set shell-enable-vterm-support to nil to avoid installing them in the first place.

Note*: M-r will only be bound to search for the command history when the variable spacemacs-vterm-history-file-location is set to the path to your shell history file.

For example with bash

(shell :variables
       spacemacs-vterm-history-file-location "~/.bash_history")