zsh in Emacs output junk characters

Question

No matter I use term or ansi-term to start zsh in Emacs, I encounter this problem, whenever I input commands, the output will have some junk characters like:

[ruby-1.9.2] ~ pwd
2;pwd1;pwd/Users/tyraeltong

the 2;pwd1;pwd is screwing the output, don't know whether others are experiencing same problem? I found a similar thread here Getting Emacs ansi-term and Zsh to play nicely but by [[ $TERM == eterm-color ]] && export TERM=xterm I still see the junk characters.

Maghutte

It's a problem caused directly or indirectly by something in your .zshrc. Probably a bad prompt setting, or one that makes unwarranted assumptions about the terminal it's running in. Post your .zshrc. – Bedfast

Actually I didn't make any customization in my .zshrc, instead, I just using .oh-my-zsh: github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh – Maghutte

Answer 1

Emacs doesn't play nice with ZLE, so I have this in my ~/.zshrc:

if [[ -n ${INSIDE_EMACS} ]]; then
    # This shell runs inside an Emacs *shell*/*term* buffer.
    prompt walters
    unsetopt zle
fi

Cutback

Thanks for reply, but with this setting, I still see the extra bits, e.g: 2;LS -G -lhF1;lstotal 72 – Maghutte

Hm, is INSIDE_EMACS set? E.g., do M-x shell in emacs, and echo $INSIDE_EMACS in there. It should output something like "24.0.97.1,comint". If not, then that variable isn't set by emacs (maybe because your emacs is too old?!). In that case, you could change the test to [[ ${TERM} == "dumb" ]] which should also work. – Cutback

Ah, and you might also need this in your ~/.emacs: (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on) – Cutback

humm, echo $INSIDE_EMACS will output something like "]2;echo 24.0.92.1,comint]1;echo24.0.92.1,comint". I also added the (add-hook) into the .emacs file, still see extra bits... BTW, which way are you using zsh under Emacs? is it "term", or "shell"? – Maghutte

I use M-x shell and the add-hook above only works for that. After doing M-x shell, a ls --color should list files in colored. If you still get the raw color escape sequences, there's something wrong. – Cutback

Answer 2

Found the solution in the related post mentioned earlier

In a nutshell, in emacs M-x package-install and install multi-term. M-x multi-term kicks off a shell, with all the bells & whistles oh-my-zsh has to offer

Backman

Answer 3

It could be an erronious PROMPT_COMMAND that has bash syntax. Try:

export PROMPT_COMMAND=""

and see if that helps.

Idelson