Re: Reasons for Switching to Eshell

[Tim X]

Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> I am slowly discovering new features in emacs and I found out it has its
> own shell (eshell).
> Now, I wonder if it is a good investment to learn how to use it. I found
> tons of tutorials online (BTW: any recommendation to start me out?), but I
> am missing the big picture.
> I suppose that eshell must be perfectly integrated with emacs, but other
> than that are there reasons to give it preference with respect to .e.g
> BASH?
> Many thanks

I think it depends on how you like to work. 

As you point out, it has the advantage of being more integrated with
emacs and unlike other shells, all your standard emacs commands and
keybindings still work well. You don't need to use other keybindings to
avoid keystrokes being interpreted by the shell e.g. Control-c etc.

The other way it is quite useful is that you can use elisp to interact
with your shell. For people coming from a lisp/scheme background, this
may be more natural than normal bash style interaction. 

eshell is not a good replacement for shell scripts, so if your someone
who writes lots of shell scripts, eshell isn't going to be a replacement
for bash. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au