After-advice for disabling evil-mode in ansi-term has no effect

Question

I'm using evil-mode and trying to make sure that it gets disabled after invoking an ansi-term.

I've tried using before and after advice to advise the ansi-term function, as well as adding a hook to term-mode, but that doesn't seem to disable evil mode in the ansi-term buffer.

I ended up defining a separate interactive function that calls ansi-term with a fixed argument and then disables evil-mode for just the current buffer.

(defun ansi-term-disable-evil ()
  "interactively call ansi-term"
  (interactive)
  (ansi-term "/bin/tcsh") ; probably shouldn't be hardcoded
  (evil-local-mode -1))

This function has the desired effect (disabling evil-mode in the ansi-term buffer).

Using after advice, however, does not work and I'm trying to understand why.

Here is what I I tried in an attempt to disable evil-mode locally after executing ansi-term.

(defun ansi-term-post ()
  "configuration settings for ansi-term"
  (evil-local-mode -1))

(advice-add 'ansi-term :after 'ansi-term-post) ; I used an ordinary symbol here, not a function object with #'

However, this didn't actually disable evil-mode in the ansi-term buffer. I'm trying to understand why.

Answer 1

Your code has a bug which should trigger an error. Apparently this error is silenced for some reason, but the error is that your ansi-term-post function will be called with the same arguments as ansi-term and this function takes at least 1 argument, so your function will be called with one argument, which will fail since your function does not accept any argument. You need to do something like:

(defun ansi-term-post (&rest _)
  "configuration settings for ansi-term"
  (evil-local-mode -1))

This said, it's likely that wasamasa's answer is a better option.

Answer 2

Disabling Evil is the wrong approach to this problem, customize the initial state for term instead:

(evil-set-initial-state 'term-mode 'emacs)