[nodejs] How to open interactive terminal apps with child_process?

This is a bit better in that it displays the output from w3m, but it's not
color formatted (I guess because its stdin is not a tty) and I can't
interact with it properly:

var cp = require('child_process'),
w3m = cp.execFile('w3m', ['http://www.google.com']);

process.stdin.pipe(w3m.stdin);
w3m.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);

So I need to make w3m know it's writing to a tty, and forward every
keystroke from Node to the child process. I tried
process.stdin.setRawMode(true) but this just locked the process up and
CTRL-C and CTRL-Z did not work.

Yes, but not with the child_process module (not reliably anyway). Try
https://github.com/chjj/pty.js

It amazes me how often a question about some capability of node is answered
with one or more spot-on solutions. I guess lampp can offer the same
convenience but node is only a few years old.

Turns out I can do what I want using spawn() instead of execFile(). I don't
quite understand why from the docs -- someone care to enlighten me as to
what's going on with processes and I/O streams and what the difference is
between the two functions?

execFile is for buffering the output and storing it in a single value
in the callback. spawn is for streaming the results. My guess is
execFile ignores the custom stdio pipes.