Emacs comes with a pretty good implementation of a terminal emulator, M-x term. Well not that good actually, but given what I use it for, it’s just what I need. Particulary if you add to that my cssh tool, so that connecting with ssh to a remote host is just a =C-= runs the command cssh-term-remote-open away, and completes on the host name thanks to ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Now, a problem that I still had to solve was the colors used in the terminal. As I’m using the tango color theme for emacs, the default ANSI palette’s blue color was not readable. Here’s how to fix that:

(require 'ansi-color)
   (setq ansi-color-names-vector
         (vector (frame-parameter nil 'background-color)
    	       "#f57900" "#8ae234" "#edd400" "#729fcf"
    	       "#ad7fa8" "cyan3" "#eeeeec")
         ansi-term-color-vector ansi-color-names-vector
         ansi-color-map (ansi-color-make-color-map))

Now your colors in an emacs terminal are easy to read, as you can see:

Hope you enjoy!