This article is mostly about using emacs -nw which will depend on a bunch of things like how terminal input is handled! With regular Emacs, as a GUI, I typically split as well but I prefer vterm over M-x shell.
I usually use `emacsclient -nw` inside a terminal (sometimes over mosh). I've found eat[1] to be much a better than vterm at being a terminal emulator inside Emacs (inside a terminal). It flickers less, and seems to handle key forwarding a lot better. The only downside is it's slightly slower than vterm at handling a large chunk of data (e.g. cat an access log).
Sorry for the tangent: I was very eager to try vterm until I read that people have had issues with evil-mode [1]. Any idea whether eat and evil can get along?
It works somewhat more reliable (I've found vterm to break in some interesting ways depending on your cursor position even with evil-collection), but it's pretty awkward to use with evil, at least without any configuration.
For example, pressing 0 to go to beginning of line goes to before the $PS1, rather than the input beginning, going from NORMAL → INSERT inserts text at the end instead of at the cursor, Emacs motion keys doesn't work, etc. I think if I take some time to remap the key it might work, but usually I just switch to Emacs mode or just restrict myself to use only cursor key to navigate.
