Just curious, why do you prefer shell instead of term or ansi-term?<p>Both of those other modes have better support for curses applications and act closer to an actual terminal emulator than M-x shell does.<p>Also, if you like term, you can use the &quot;multi-term&quot; script (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;multi-term.el" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;multi-term.el</a>), which will automatically open a new terminal window with M-x multi-term, and you can cycle through your open terminals with M-x multi-term-next and multi-term-prev