Re: shell-like Emacs CLI, and my Usenet behaviour

[mathias . dahl]

> I have been thinking if not Emacs would benefit from a shell-like CLI, 
> instead of hammering the RET between each stage?
> 
> Is this a new idea or did anyone do work on it?
> 
> There are several advantages:
> 
> For a simple example, the advantage is speed, less typing, and no visual 
> "reorient" after the RET.
> 
> In a shell:
> 
> man emacs RET
> 
> In Emacs:
> 
> M-x man RET emacs RET

For some commands (interactive functions) you can get something like this in 
eshell (M-x eshell). In eshell, try for example this:

 $ woman emacs RET

(I'm on a Windows box right now so I cannot test, but that should work)

However, that will only work (I think) for commands (and non-interactive 
functions as well) that take parameters, where Emacs will pass the arguments 
from the Eshell command line, to the command/function, as arguments. For 
commands that by explicit code asks the user for a value, it would not work 
without some clever hacks, I think.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable about the internals of calling commands can 
comment on this?

/Mathias