Seven or eight months ago, I wrote about a couple of posts from Pierre Neidhardt (Ambrevar) concerning Eshell and the utility of doing as much as possible in Emacs (1, 2). Since then, he’s revised them a bit from the original reddit postings and made them available on his site at Eshell as a main shell and Emacs Everywhere.
I rediscovered them when @hideo_is tweeted links to them. These are really interesting posts and well worth reading again. Ambrevar states his belief that although eshell is not a standard Unix shell, it is better suited for use with Emacs—not being tied to ancient terminals in the way traditional shells are—and that its differences should therefore be celebrated rather than looked upon as shortcomings. He makes, I think, a convincing case for that belief.
In the Emacs Everywhere post he describes the joy of doing almost everything from within Emacs and pleads the case that Emacs is not a violation of the Unix philosophy of a program doing one thing well. He says, essentially, that the one thing Emacs does and does well is to provide a standard and powerful interface to other programs and packages. In that way, it is no different from Qt, GTK, Tk, or even curses.
I enjoyed reading the posts again and you probably will too. If you haven’t already read them, be sure to take a look. They’re definitely worth your time.