I use ansi-term quite a bit. Why leave Emacs to have a terminal? However, there were a few issues I had with ansi-term that were quite annoying. However, because Emacs is awesome, the issues were pretty easily fixed. First things first, I didn’t like that running exit in my terminal left a useless buffer around. A little searching around online, and I found the following solution, using defadvice:

( defadvice term-sentinel ( around my-advice-term-sentinel ( proc msg )) ( if ( memq ( process-status proc ) ' ( signal exit )) ( let (( buffer ( process-buffer proc ))) ad-do-it ( kill-buffer buffer )) ad-do-it )) ( ad-activate 'term-sentinel )

This tells term (which is used by ansi-term) to kill the buffer after the terminal is exited. The original I found online also killed the frame, but I use one frame with multiple windows, so I removed that call.

Secondly, I always use bash. I don’t need ansi-term to ask me which shell to use every time I invoke it. Once again, defadvice to the rescue. I wrote the following bit of advice that lets the user set the shell program to a variable, then advise ansi-term to always use that (and not ask). The defvar could just as easily be made a defcustom, and perhaps one day I’ll do that. For now, though, this works for me.

( defvar my-term-shell "/bin/bash" ) ( defadvice ansi-term ( before force-bash ) ( interactive ( list my-term-shell ))) ( ad-activate 'ansi-term )

Another issue I has was with the display of certain characters and control codes. The following hook sets the term to use UTF-8.

( defun my-term-use-utf8 () ( set-buffer-process-coding-system 'utf-8-unix 'utf-8-unix )) ( add-hook 'term-exec-hook 'my-term-use-utf8 )

Next, I wanted URLs that show up in my terminal (via man pages, help, info, errors, etc) to be clickable. This was solved very easily by hooking goto-address-mode into ansi-term. To make add more hooks into ansi-term easier in the future, I defined my own hook function, currently with just goto-address-mode :

( defun my-term-hook () ( goto-address-mode ))

Then added my hook to term-mode-hook:

( add-hook 'term-mode-hook 'my-term-hook )

After this, I realized that C-y doesn’t work in ansi-term like you’d expect. It pastes into the buffer, sure, but the text doesn’t get sent to the process. So if you copy a bash command, then C-y it into the buffer, nothing happens when you press enter (because, as far as ansi-term is concerned, no text was entered at the prompt). The following function will paste whatever is copied into ansi-term in such a way that the process can, well, process it:

( defun my-term-paste ( &optional string ) ( interactive ) ( process-send-string ( get-buffer-process ( current-buffer )) ( if string string ( current-kill 0 ))))

Then I just add the binding to my hook from before, making it this:

( defun my-term-hook () ( goto-address-mode ) ( define-key term-raw-map "\C-y" 'my-term-paste ))

Since I’ve already hooked it into ‘term-mode-hook, there’s no reason to do so again. Simply reevaluate the function.

Finally, I’ve recently been using the solarized theme, both in Emacs and in my terminals. However, ansi-term wasn’t quite playing well with this. The colors were wrong in ansi-term, even though they were right in the rest of Emacs. A friend and co-worker of mine wrote the following bit of elisp that, when added to the term-mode-hook, makes ansi-term use the right colors for solarized. *(Note that this is only needed if you use solarized and your ansi-term doesn’t look right. Installing solarized, either in emacs or on your system, is beyond the scope of this post. However, I should mention that you can find it via M-x package-list-packages. The one you probably want is color-theme-solarized .) So, adding the elisp he wrote to my my-term-hook results in this:

( defun my-term-hook () ( goto-address-mode ) ( define-key term-raw-map "\C-y" 'my-term-paste ) ( let (( base03 "#002b36" ) ( base02 "#073642" ) ( base01 "#586e75" ) ( base00 "#657b83" ) ( base0 "#839496" ) ( base1 "#93a1a1" ) ( base2 "#eee8d5" ) ( base3 "#fdf6e3" ) ( yellow "#b58900" ) ( orange "#cb4b16" ) ( red "#dc322f" ) ( magenta "#d33682" ) ( violet "#6c71c4" ) ( blue "#268bd2" ) ( cyan "#2aa198" ) ( green "#859900" )) ( setq ansi-term-color-vector ( vconcat ` ( unspecified , base02 , red , green , yellow , blue , magenta , cyan , base2 )))))

Again, its already added to my term-mode-hook, so reevaluate and off we go.

So there you have it. With a little bit of elisp, ansi-term is much more streamlined (in my opinion) and better to work with. Hopefully this information will help others in the future.