Send commands to Emacs from programs running in term.el.
Programs running in term.el can print a special escape sequence to run commands in Emacs -- this is how directory tracking works. However, by default the commands are hard-coded, and you can't add new ones.
This package lets you add new commands. It uses a different escape sequence to avoid interfering with the built-in commands, but the principle is the same. When a program prints a command, it won't show up on the screen, but will instead be interpreted by Emacs.
This is a library, and doesn't make any user-visible changes. For an example of something that uses it, see term-alert.
To register a command:
(add-to-list
'term-cmd-commands-alist
'("command" . some-callback-function))where "command" is the name of the command, and some-callback-function is
the function you want to be called when the command is run. The function should
take two arguments -- the first is the command name itself, and the second is
the command's argument.
To send a command, use the emacs-term-cmd script:
emacs-term-cmd command argIf called outside Emacs, this does nothing (i.e. it won't mess things up).
Because the commands are based on terminal output, they work just as well through nested shells, multiple SSH sessions, and tmux.
Install the term-cmd package from MELPA.
To use inside tmux, add set -g allow-passthrough all to ~/.tmux.conf.
The emacs-term-cmd command will always be on the PATH of any shell launched
from Emacs. However, for full functionality you should also add
~/.emacs.d/term-cmd (or wherever your user-emacs-directory is) to the PATH
in your environment or shell's startup files (e.g. ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc,
~/.zshrc, etc.), on any machine you often SSH into; this will allow shells
inside tmux or on other machines to send commands back to Emacs on your local
machine.
Copyright (C) 2014--2026 Callie Cameron
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.