I haven't seen much discussion of the intermediate solution: have a command shell that *isn't* a terminal emulator.
There have been several attempts at this, with varying degrees of success. A command shell window which does good, solid handling of command line utilities would be terrific. It would require none of the morass of issues of terminal emulation, but still allow me/you to do many of the things that would be so useful. I'm currently switching around between plugins like vimsh.vim which uses Python, and my own home grown version which uses more primitive interaction with Cygwin OS. They come close, but aren't fully fledged, and seemingly aren't well known or used. I'm fiddling around with using my GetChar patch, which would allow character by character interaction from Vim script with an external shell. This would be best, but until something like this becomes official, a good line by line interaction would satisfy a real need. An officially distributed plugin would be a great addition to Vim, on the order of Netrw.
