Need more visibility on evil-ghostel-toggle-send-esc

[mike-inkeep]

scenario: I'm a new user, I've got ghostel setup in doom emacs (+evil mode). I fire up a ghostel terminal and start claude TUI, and then I'm trapped with no way to exit the session. I haven't felt this way since I first tried to quit Vim.

a few ideas:

1. Put this somewhere more prominently in the ghostel README, particularly in or near the Input modes and Evil sections
2. Add a README to evil-ghostel
3. if you want to get fancy with it, detect rage typing / frustration signals and give the user some guidance.

I think there's also a story here for the user that doesn't even have evil-ghostel installed, but in my case Doom's config took care of that for me.

Happy to put up a PR if requested

[dakra]

I fire up a ghostel terminal and start claude TUI, and then I'm trapped with no way to exit the session.

Can you describe quickly what was the problem?
From the title I assume you started claude in /tui fullscreen which switches to alt-screen and makes evil-ghostel route ESC to Claude instead of evil-mode?! But I don't see why that hindered you from exiting claude.

I haven't felt this way since I first tried to quit Vim.

😂

[SpyrosRoum]

I just run into this today (literally the first time I tried to open claude in ghostel). Indeed with /tui fullscreen, it looks like pressing ESC does nothing. I tried to cycle evil-ghostel-toggle-send-esc to either auto or terminal modes and both times nothing happened when I pressed esc.

[mike-inkeep]

I fire up a ghostel terminal and start claude TUI, and then I'm trapped with no way to exit the session.

Can you describe quickly what was the problem? From the title I assume you started claude in /tui fullscreen which switches to alt-screen and makes evil-ghostel route ESC to Claude instead of evil-mode?! But I don't see why that hindered you from exiting claude.

Yes, claude with /tui fullscreen, ESC routes to Claude instead of evil-mode, so there is no way to enter normal mode which is necessary for interacting with doom/evil emacs. Normally I would hit ESC to enter normal mode, and then can hit SPC leader key to access all of doom's menus. I can still quit claude via C-c or /exit, but there's no way to interact with emacs without exiting claude first.

It looks like emacs' C-x and and C-c and M-x still work, so I could've just used that. But it's not really a natural way to work for someone who's very used to evil-mode and doom or spacemacs.

So this might just be a problem with my workflow and ignorance of standard emacs commands, but I think it would've been an easier onboarding if I'd known how to route ESC to evil.

[mike-inkeep]

Another idea, perhaps add a default binding to evil-ghostel: C-c <escape> -> (evil-force-normal-state)

[dakra]

@SpyrosRoum @mike-inkeep Have a look at PR #543

I made a few changes there:

1. There I added a part to the README and the package description in evil-ghostel.el.
   I also made that when pressing ESC in auto-mode in a TUI app, you get a one time message in the minibuffer that ESC goes to the terminal and how to switch.

2. Then I changed evil-ghostel-toggle-send-escape to always toggle the mode when set to 'auto.
   So before when in 'auto and you're in a TUI app you had to call it twice as it would switch from auto -> terminal -> evil.
   Now in that case it goes directly auto -> evil.

3. I bound evil-ghostel-toggle-send-escape to a key for easier calling/discoverability

4. Make your suggestion and bound evil-force-normal-state to C-c <escape> (with the caveat that this is not working in TTY emacs)

---

But having sad all that, I'm not a evil (or doom) user, so maybe auto is just the wrong default and evil would be better?
My thinking was that it's convenient when you enter vim somewhere, and also in htop or a lot of other alt-screen apps
you want ESC to go to them.

But I'm open to change defaults (we're pre 1.0 after all).
Feedback welcome.