Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)

4 days ago

The author switches from Zshell, Fish, and Bash to Emacs' eshell for better integration with their Emacs-driven workflow.
Eshell offers advantages like consistent behavior across operating systems, access to Emacs functions, and extensibility with Emacs Lisp.
Eshell lacks documentation and struggles with programs that attempt terminal control, but integrates well with Emacs features like paging and searching.
Custom functions like `eshell-here` and `eshell/x` enhance the workflow by managing shell buffers and windows efficiently.
Eshell acts as a Lisp REPL, allowing for simplified command syntax and access to Emacs variables and functions.
File selection and manipulation in Eshell is powerful, with predicates and modifiers for filtering and transforming file names and lists.
Custom predicates can be created for Eshell, such as filtering Org-mode files by their tags.
Eshell integrates with Emacs features like `highlight-regexp` and allows piping output directly to Emacs buffers.

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