Eshell

eshell is the shell I’ve tried using over time, and in the end just never stick with it. Let’s try one more time with a couple of tricks. The first tricks are mostly documentation:

M-& in a tramp-aware session means you run commands in a new buffer, without a TTY. Great for things like tailf.
for ncurses-like applications, “visual commands” is the missing context. Applications like top are in the default list by default, but let’s:
- add htop to that default list, because I occasionally use it
- and remember about eshell-exec-visual, which runs the command as a visual command.

(require 'em-term)

(add-to-list 'eshell-visual-commands "htop")

That said, I also need to automatically close the command buffer on exit, because who wants stale buffers.

(setq eshell-destroy-buffer-when-process-dies t)

One last thing, that turns out to be very annoying: eshell-exec-visual is not tramp-aware. Let’s make it tramp-aware for SSH at least:

 (defun eshell-exec-visual (&rest args)
   "Run the specified PROGRAM in a terminal emulation buffer.
 ARGS are passed to the program.  At the moment, no piping of input is
 allowed."
   (let* (eshell-interpreter-alist
	   (original-args args)
	   (interp (eshell-find-interpreter (car args) (cdr args)))
	   (in-ssh-tramp (and (tramp-tramp-file-p default-directory)
			      (equal (tramp-file-name-method
				      (tramp-dissect-file-name default-directory))
				     "ssh")))
	   (program (if in-ssh-tramp
			"ssh"
		      (car interp)))
	   (args (if in-ssh-tramp
		     (let ((dir-name (tramp-dissect-file-name default-directory)))
		       (eshell-flatten-list
			(list
			 "-t"
			 (tramp-file-name-host dir-name)
			 (format
			  "export TERM=xterm-256color; cd %s; exec %s"
			  (tramp-file-name-localname dir-name)
			  (string-join
			   (append
			    (list (tramp-file-name-localname (tramp-dissect-file-name (car interp))))
			    (cdr args))
			   " ")))))
		   (eshell-flatten-list
		    (eshell-stringify-list (append (cdr interp)
						   (cdr args))))))
	   (term-buf
	    (generate-new-buffer
	     (concat "*"
		     (if in-ssh-tramp
			 (format "%s %s" default-directory (string-join original-args " "))
			 (file-name-nondirectory program))
		     "*")))
	   (eshell-buf (current-buffer)))
     (save-current-buffer
	(switch-to-buffer term-buf)
	(term-mode)
	(set (make-local-variable 'term-term-name) eshell-term-name)
	(make-local-variable 'eshell-parent-buffer)
	(setq eshell-parent-buffer eshell-buf)
	(term-exec term-buf program program nil args)
	(let ((proc (get-buffer-process term-buf)))
	  (if (and proc (eq 'run (process-status proc)))
	      (set-process-sentinel proc 'eshell-term-sentinel)
	    (error "Failed to invoke visual command")))
	(term-char-mode)
	(if eshell-escape-control-x
	    (term-set-escape-char ?\C-x))))
   nil)

Besides that, let’s have some sane default settings.

For example, default history size is 128 items. lol.

(setq eshell-history-size 1000000)

(Side note: this is a nice trick to import all of bash history. Only run once though: eshell-read-history ~/.bash_history.)

Let’s also make tramp a bit faster:

 ;; cache file-name forever
 (setq remote-file-name-inhibit-cache nil)

 ;; make sure vc stuff is not making tramp slower
 (setq vc-ignore-dir-regexp
	(format "%s\\|%s"
		vc-ignore-dir-regexp
		tramp-file-name-regexp))

 ;; not sure why we have this? just cargo-culting from an answer I saw
 ;; online.
 (setq tramp-verbose 1)

 ;; projectile has the fun side-effect of wanting to calculate the
 ;; project name, which makes tramp oh-so-much-slower.
 (setq projectile-mode-line "Projectile")

But the real performance gain is making sure that the ~/.ssh/config file has this:

Host *
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%h:%p
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPersist 10m

(aka: make every SSH connection use the “control master” openssh feature, which opens a single SSH connection, reuses it when you create new channels, and keeps it around for 10 minutes until after you’ve closed your last channel.)

ralt/eshell.org

Eshell