Open external terminals from Emacs December 24, 2018

3 minutes read

How to integrate your terminal with Emacs in an quick way and open it based on the current project or current working directory.

Quick note about non-Linux OSes

The trick I'm using applies to Linux only (go, sue me for this). For other operating systems check out cool package terminal-here (it supports Linux as well).

The trick

( defun open-terminal () "Open default terminal emulator in the current directory." ( interactive ) ( start-process "terminal" nil ( getenv "TERMINAL" ))) ( defun open-terminal-in-project-root () "Open default terminal in the project root." ( interactive ) ( let (( default-directory ( projectile-project-root ))) ( open-terminal )))

These two functions are basically it. They'll open the terminal in the current working directory ( default-directory in Emacs terms) and in the project root respectively. If you close Emacs (why would you do this?), all terminals will be closed as well. But how does it work?

Emacs can start other programs

Amazing, right? start-process allows us to run other programs and bind them to Emacs. It accepts some arguments:

Process name which we can see in the process list ( M-x list-processes ). Buffer associated with the process ( nil means no buffer for the process). The actual program to run. Arguments for the process we're about to start. We're not using it.

Ok, so in Linux, you can get the default terminal by reading from $TERMINAL environment variable (check echo $TERMINAL in the console). Emacs way of reading environment variable is (getenv "TERMINAL") . It gets us the name of the default terminal emulator which Emacs will gladly run for us.

Changing default terminal directory

Often you're editing a file somewhere deep in the project hierarchy, but you need the terminal in the project root. Of course, you're using projectile, right ? Projectile has projectile-run-<X> where <X> is any terminal built into Emacs. But we need external one! Luckily, (projectile-project-root) gives us the root directory of the project. We assign it to the default-directory using let which will ensure that our change will stay only during the function lifetime, and we don't mess with the whole buffer default directory which other things might be using.

What else can we do

As an exercise, you can consider adding more functionality. Like support for opening remote directories (check make-process ) or you can add support for passing custom environment variables. This way your terminal can, for example, start with custom Python virtualenv activated (check process-environment ). Or you can start some other program in the newly opened terminal.

Why bother

Many people use embedded Emacs terminals successfully (sometimes their workflow looks like magic). Also, integration between embedded terminals and the rest of Emacs is better than anything you could get with an external one. However, there are rough edges and quirks here and there. External terminals have better TUI support, they are faster, often they have better colors and even leverage GPU for rendering. It also makes perfect sense if you're using a tiling window manager and rely heavily on having multiple terminals laying around. And people asking for it.

Check the discussion on Reddit.