Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the buffer.
One possible programming workflow is to use Emacs for all your text editing needs then switch to a Terminal for your terminal-related needs. This is good and all, but sometimes when I'm in terminal I miss having all my Emacs niceties (e.g., keyboard navigation, copy & paste commands, window movement). Luckily, there are several ways to run shells right inside of Emacs.
There are at least 3 ways to run a shell inside of Emacs.
M-x eshell, will run a shell that has been implemented in elisp.M-x shell, will run a terminal emulator.M-x term, will proxy commands to and from your actual shell.M-x ansi-term, same as M-x term, as far as I can tell.They all have trade-offs and figuring out the best solution for you is part of the fun. I tend to use eshell as much as I can. When it falls over on certain tasks (e.g., won't clear), I switch to `M-x ansi-term`.
So pretend you ran M-x eshell and you're facing the eshell prompt. You start treating it like a normal shell.
$ ls
$ cd ..
Sweet, it's like a normal shell but you can move through your history with normal Emacs commands (C-p to move up a line, M-v to move up a page, C-r to search backwards, M-r to search through previous commands).
There are a couple of issues, however. clear doesn't work. Grr. Any bash aliases you have also won't be present. Grr. You need a special eshell alias file for that. You may get strange characters appearing in your output from time to time. It also interacts poorly with any commands that use a pager (e.g., git log). I don't really want a pager in eshell because Emacs itself is a pretty good pager. I added the following line to my .emacs.d config file to effectively disable paging in Emacs.
(setenv "PAGER" "cat")
One neat feature is if I run a grep command from eshell it pops me into an Emacs-y results window. Try it and enjoy.
Eshell is also crazy because it's a shell that also acts like a lisp REPL. I haven't totally figured out the benefit(s) of that, but I assume there's power there.
http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/eshell-fun.html
If you run M-x ansi-term you'll get a buffer with a more realistic shell inside of it. clear works! The kicker is that many of your Emacs keybindings don't work anymore. C-p cycles through your previously run commands (as it would in your normal Terminal) instead of moving up a line (as it would in normal Emacs). You can switch into "emacs mode" with C-c C-j and back into "terminal mode" with C-c C-k.