I'm also a a long time vi user. I can't say why you hadn't heard about Eshell. I can say that Emacs has several such shell/terminal things most with different approaches.
My own most recent experience was I did a weekend experiment to switch over to Emacs. I've been trying to find more and more reasons to write various flavors of Lisp. My experiment was going well until I got to this part of Emacs. I realized a lot of my existing workflows depend on at some point bringing text into the editor, composing more text and sending it to the shell. From a programming perspective the different approaches I tried in Emacs (Eshell, dired and at least two more) seemed really cool, but the performance was unacceptable. I was left with blank screens, flashing cursors and scraps of text.
Does someone know is there one of the Emacs approaches to interacting with a shell or performing shell-like activities, that has dramatically better/native-like performance?
My own most recent experience was I did a weekend experiment to switch over to Emacs. I've been trying to find more and more reasons to write various flavors of Lisp. My experiment was going well until I got to this part of Emacs. I realized a lot of my existing workflows depend on at some point bringing text into the editor, composing more text and sending it to the shell. From a programming perspective the different approaches I tried in Emacs (Eshell, dired and at least two more) seemed really cool, but the performance was unacceptable. I was left with blank screens, flashing cursors and scraps of text.
Does someone know is there one of the Emacs approaches to interacting with a shell or performing shell-like activities, that has dramatically better/native-like performance?