Re: Thinking of Converting to EShell - Opinions?

[Kai Grossjohann]

"Tennis Smith" <tennis_smith@yahoo-remove-to-reply.com> writes:

> I've used tcsh for years. But it looks like the eshell is finally mature
> enough to be a good alternative.  Is it? Can you use it on a daily basis
> without having to switch back? Is the conversion worth the effort?

AFAICT, eshell has always been "mature" in the sense that the software
was working well.  There is, however, a documentation problem.  The
Emacs Wiki (www.emacswiki.org) has a great section on Eshell.  Perhaps
that is good enough for you?

>From the functionality perspective, what I really really like a lot
about eshell is that you can invoke Emacs functions so easily.  For
instance, "man foo" from eshell does like M-x man RET foo RET.  And
"make all" does like M-x compile RET C-a C-k make all RET.  You can
also just enter a Lisp expression as a command.

>From the same perspective, what is missing is input redirection (you
can't say "foo < bar", you have to say "cat bar | foo"), and for
output redirection, stdout and stderr are not separated.  That is,
"foo > bar" will put both stderr and stdout into bar.  This, however,
is not the "fault" of eshell, it's a general Emacs limitation.

The fact that it is so easy to invoke Emacs functions from eshell
caused me to write an add-on for regular shell mode to enable invoking
Emacs functions from it.  It is not working very well, though.  Not
sure if I ever get the chance to polish it.

Oh, and one minor issue that you might encounter when you start with
eshell is the unusual completion style.  It is called "cycling
completion".  You can turn it off.

Kai