How to open multiple terminals?

Question

In Emacs, I often find myself in a situation where I need to jump back and forth between various source files to various terminals. However, I feel like I do not have a good way to do this efficiently and it's clumsy that you can only open one shell in Emacs (shell, eshell, or term).

Moreover, I need an efficient way of juggle between multiple terminals and source files.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

You can have as many terminals and shells open at once as you want. Just use M-x rename-buffer to change the name of an existing *term* or *shell* buffer, and the next time you do M-x term or M-x shell, a brand new buffer will be created. In the case of M-x shell, a prefix argument will cause you to be prompted for the name of the new shell buffer, as offby1 noted.

A few years ago I had a job where I had to regularly log in to various production servers named "host01.foo.com", "host02.foo.com", etc. I wrote a little function like this one to make it easier to manage them all:

(defun ssh-to-host (num)   (interactive "P")   (let* ((buffer-name (format "*host%02d*" num))          (buffer (get-buffer buffer-name)))     (if buffer         (switch-to-buffer buffer)       (term "/bin/bash")       (term-send-string        (get-buffer-process (rename-buffer buffer-name))        (format "ssh host%02d.foo.com\r" num))))) 

Then I bound this command to (say) s-h (super H), enabling me to just type M-5 s-h. If I didn't already have a buffer named *host05*, it would start a new terminal emulator buffer, rename it to *host05*, and ssh me into host05.foo.com. If buffer *host05* already existed, it would simply switch me to it. Quite handy!