Question

In windows shell it’s possible to pause the output just by selecting a text in the shell window (a QuickEdit mode must be enabled). The same is possible in the cygwin shell (again with a QuickEdit mode).

How can I pause the output in emacs shell?

I need to pause it because some tasks are very verbose and it’s difficult to search the necessary text in a big buffer.

When I execute M-x comint-stop-subjob I get a message “No SIGTSTP support”

As an example try to pause the following:

find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec  cat {} ';'

Answer 1

Not exactly what you asked for, but clone-buffer will get you close to what you want. After binding it to a convenient key and running your find command, calling clone-buffer will copy the contents of the buffer to a new buffer. The find command in the original buffer keeps running, but the cloned buffer contains only the output of find up to the point that you cloned it.

You can invoke this command multiple times in the original window, giving you a series of stop points to examine. I don’t know how to actually pause the original window though.

Note that the newly cloned buffers are fully functional shell buffers.