How do you run iex from Emacs?

Question

I keep on getting this warning when I run iex using elixir-mode-iex from Emacs:

Warning: could not run smart terminal, falling back to dumb one

I think that this just means that I don't get tab completion, which I'm fine with. But I'd like a smart terminal if it's possible with elixir-mode in Emacs.

Answer 1

elixir-mode-iex uses the comint-mode major mode to interactive with iex. That also means that it's acting just like a dumb terminal (doesn't have the ability to process special escape sequences etc see here).

As a workaround you just could use term which sends any key press directly to the subprocess itself. You could write a function like the following:

(defun my-elixir-iex ()
  (interactive)
  (term "iex"))

I'm working on an iex Alchemist.el integration, which brings functionality like Inf-Ruby has. But until it's done try to just use iex via term

Cheers

Samuel

Answer 2

It looks like that warning occurs when IEX can't find tty support. You can enable tty mode in emacs by invoking it with -nw.