Regular Irreal readers know that I’m a fan of Howard Abrams’ posts and videos on Emacs. Abrams gave a talk at EmacsConf 2022 on the Top 10 reasons why you should be using Eshell. He felt that the talk was a little compressed so he wrote a separate blog post that covers the same material.
I found that the best strategy is to listen to the talk and then read the post to fill in any details that you might have missed in the video. The video ran to 14 minutes so it should be easy to find time for it.
Like much useful software, Eshell is pretty easy for trivial operations but also has powerful, advanced features that are very useful but harder to learn. The canonical example of this is file glob filters. They’re also available in Zshell and I’m always promising myself to learn them but unless I use them all the time I tend to forget the details.
Abrams also demonstrates some of his bespoke code that he uses to make using Eshell easier. For applications that require things like cursor addressing, he uses vterm but for most things he prefers Eshell. The nice thing, he says, is that Eshell is both a shell and an Elisp REPL at the same time. Again, the syntax is a bit different from Bash or Zshell so you need to use it regularly to internalize it.
Spend 14 minutes with the video and if you like what you see, take a look at his blog post. Definitely worthwhile if you do a lot of shell work. And, of course, you can stay in Emacs while you’re doing it.