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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T19:12:23+00:00

I M-x shell to run a program that tries to produce nice color output.

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I M-x shell to run a program that tries to produce nice color output. But I get:

?- true.
^[[1mtrue.^[[0m

This is clearly not a fault of EMACS, as it sets the environment variable TERM to dumb. It is just the program I called that ignored this information.

I am aware of ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on which fixes this problem in an ad hoc manner: The environment variable TERM is still dumb. That is, a program interpreting this variable accordingly would not use escapes at all.

Is there a less ad-hoc approach to this, setting the TERM or similar?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can use M-x ansi-term instead of the other shells (M-x shell, M-x term and M-x eshell). Ansi-term was designed to work off-the-shelf with ansi colors. And even better, I suggest that you use multi-term (you can read more about it here and here) which essentially supports all the features of ansi-term plus the ability to easily switch between terminals and define which keyboard shortcuts are sent to the terminal and which ones are captured and interpreted by Emacs.

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