MisTTY

MisTTY is a major mode for Emacs 29.1 and up that runs a shell inside of a buffer, similarly to comint mode. It is built on top of term.el. Check out its project page at https://github.com/szermatt/mistty.

M-x mistty creates a buffer with an interactive shell. (Launching)

MisTTY feels very much like comint mode: you can move around freely and run any Emacs command you want - until you press TAB and end up with the native completion or notice the shell autosuggestions. With MisTTY you have access to both Emacs and the shell commands and editing tools.

Additionally, commands that take over the entire screen (Fullscreen Mode) such as less or vi also work, temporarily taking over the window, while scrollback remains available in another buffer.

MisTTY works well with Bash and ZSH, but it is especially well suited to running Fish: you get autosuggestions, completion in full colors. Here’s what the end result might look like:

Screen grab showing MisTTY in action

MisTTY is known to work on Linux and MacOS. It also supports non-shell command-line programs, such as python.

The latest version of this documentation is available at https://mistty.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Once MisTTY is installed, this documentation can be accessed from inside Emacs using M-x info g mistty

Note

If you encounter issues, please take the time to file a bug. (Reporting issues)

Comparison with other packages

MisTTY isn’t a terminal emulator, but rather a frontend to an existing terminal emulator, the built-in term.el. Its goal is to make it more convenient to use while inside of Emacs and better integrate with Emacs itself. In theory, other terminal emulators than term.el might be used as engine for MisTTY, such as vterm and eat.

MisTTY has some similarities with coterm; it offers the same switch between full-screen and line mode.

Coterm, term.el and eat all have a line mode, just like comint does, which allows you to edit a command line as a whole before sending it to the shell. While in line mode, rendering is done by Emacs and editing commands are Emacs commands. In constrast, with MisTTY, all rendering is done by the shell through the terminal. This is why native shell completion and autosuggestion is available with MisTTY and not in line modes and why you can freely mix shell commands with Emacs commands while editing the command line.

term.el and eat also have a char mode, where rendering and command execution is handled by the shell, and editing with Emacs isn’t available. The difference with MisTTY is then that MisTTY makes Emacs editing commands available when possible.

eat also has a semi-char mode, which is the closest there is to MisTTY. In that mode, Emacs movements commands are available. However, Emacs commands that modify the buffer, aren’t available to edit the command line. In contrast, MisTTY allows Emacs to navigate to and edit the whole buffer, then replays changes made to the command-line.

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