comint

Inferior Scheme mode) and all the other modes derived from Comint do not ever lock up Emacs.

Maybe I should use eshell or one of the comint shells more.

(Any mode derived from comint mode is an example.) Your Emacs is never waiting for an asynchronously-communicating external process, is it?

It supports more backend debuggers, multiple concurrent sessions and attaching to a debugger session in an existing Comint buffer (presumably that means it supports attaching to existing processes as well; don't know if the original GUD gdb mode does that).

- Or check out this awesome, high-performance code from the function comint-exec:;; Feed it the startfile.

(setq comint-input-ring-size 2048) The default undo history is only 32.

A lot of my coworkers use Sublime and remote file editing, but I work faster when using Emacs (comint-mode is a godsend).

Shell mode (and more generally any mode derived from Comint mode) in Emacs also requires a TTY/PTY pair: although the Emacs documentation claims that Comint-derived modes can be configured to use a pipe instead, a comment in comint.el confesses that no one has gotten that to actually work.

Its core could probably get by fine on undo/history management, file and buffer management, syntax highlighting, a keybinding system, a generic comint-like mode for shells and interpreters, other external process call functions, and...

(cond (startfile;;This is guaranteed to wait long enough;;but has bad results if the comint does not prompt at all;; (while (= size (buffer-size));; (sleep-for 1));;I hope 1 second is enough!

Unless you add something to "comint-preoutput-filter-functions" to discard output, you get to lean on C-c and wait for things to settle down.