As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Eshell and use it was my main shell. The traditional gripe about it has always been that there’s no manual. John Wiegley, who wrote Eshell, offered to write a manual if someone would pay for it but, apparently, no one stepped up so for many years there was no manual.
I’ve been dimly aware of a project to write such a manual and, indeed, there’s an early version in my Emacs 28.2 build. Jim Porter writes that he has merged what he hopes is the final version of the manual and is asking that anyone interested take a look at it and let him know if you find any gaps or bugs. He’s added a lot of material since the last release so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re an Eshell user.
There’s a lot of power in Eshell but without a manual, it’s always been hard to discover. Mostly you had to read blog posts or videos by those who are familiar with the source code. Now that there’s a complete manual, it’s probably worthwhile reading through it to discover all that it’s capable of.
Most developers don’t enjoy writing documentation so we owe Porter a special debt of gratitude for picking up the project and seeing it through.