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Eshell is a command shell written using Emacs Lisp. All of what it does it uses Emacs' facilities to do. This means Eshell is as portable as Emacs itself. It also means that cooperation with other Lisp code is natural and seamless.
So what is a command shell? To properly understand the role of a shell, it's necessary to visualize what a computer does for you. Basically, a computer is a tool; in order to use that tool, you must tell it what to do--or give it "commands". These commands take many forms, such as clicking with a mouse on certain parts of the screen. But that is only one form of command input.
By far the most versatile way to express what you want the computer to
do is using an abbreviated language, called script. In script, instead
of telling the computer, "list my files, please", we write just
"list". In fact, this command is so commonly used that we abbreviate
it to "ls". Typing ls in a command shell is a script way of
telling the computer to list your files. This is comparable to viewing
the contents of a folder using a graphical display.
The real flexibility is apparent only when you realize that there are many, many ways to list your files. Perhaps you want them sorted by name, or sorted by date, or in reverse order, or grouped by type. Most graphical browsers have simple ways to express this. But what about showing only a few files, or only files that meet a certain criteria? In very complex and specific situations, the request becomes too difficult to express with a mouse. It is just these kinds of requests that are solvable using a command shell.
For example, what if you want to list every Word file on your hard drive, larger than 100 kilobytes in size, and which hasn't been looked at in over six months? That is a good candidate list for deletion, when you go to clean up your hard drive. But have you ever tried asking your computer for such a list? There is no way to do it! At least, not without using a command shell.
So the role of a command shell is to give you more control over what your computer does for you. Not everyone needs this amount of control, and it does come at a cost: Learning the necessary script commands to express what you want done. A complicated query, such as the example above, takes time to learn. But if you find yourself using your computer frequently enough, it is more than worthwhile in the long run. Any tool you use often deserves your time in learning to master it. (1)
As of Emacs 21, Eshell is part of the standard Emacs distribution.
| 1.1 Contributors to Eshell | ||
| 1.2 Installation |
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Contributions to Eshell are welcome. I have limited time to work on this project, but I will gladly add any code you contribute to me to this package.
The following persons have made contributions to Eshell.
Apart from these, a lot of people have sent suggestions, ideas, requests, bug reports and encouragement. Thanks a lot! Without you there would be no new releases of Eshell.
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As mentioned above, Eshell comes preinstalled since Emacs 21. If you're using Emacs 20.4 or later, or XEmacs 21, you can download the most recent version of Eshell from http://www.gci-net.com/users/j/johnw/Emacs/eshell.tar.gz.
If you are using Emacs 21, please skip this section.
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Here's exactly what to do, with no explanation why:
You should see a version banner displayed.
Confirm that you see a file listing.
Confirm that everything runs correctly. Use `M-x eshell-report-bug' if not.
(add-to-list 'load-path "<directory where you install Eshell>") (load "eshell-auto") |
Read the manual and enjoy!
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load-path variable. This can be done within Emacs by
typing:
ESC : (add-to-list 'load-path "<path where Eshell resides>") RET ESC : (add-to-list 'load-path "<path where Pcomplete resides>") RET |
ls followed by
RET. You should have already seen a version banner announcing the
version number of this release, followed by a prompt.
eshell-test followed by RET
in the Eshell buffer. It is important that Emacs be left alone while
the tests are running, since extraneous command input may cause some of
the tests to fail (they were never intended to run in the background).
If all of the tests pass, Eshell should work just fine on your system.
If any of the tests fail, please send e-mail to the Eshell maintainer
using the command M-x eshell-report-bug.
lispdir and infodir. The elisp files will be copied to
lispdir, and the info file to infodir.
make install in the directory containing the Eshell sources.
This will byte-compile all of the `.el' files and copy both the
source and compiled versions to the directories specified in the
previous step. It will also copy the info file, and add a corresponding
entry to your `dir' file----if `install-info' can be found.
If you only want to create the compiled elisp files, but don't want to
install them, you can type just make instead.
load-path variable. This can be done by adding the following
line to your `.emacs' file:
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/eshell") |
The actual directory on your system may differ.
(load "eshell-auto") |
eshell-modules-list. This variable selects which Eshell
extension modules you want to use. You will find documentation on each
of those modules in the Info manual.
If you have TeX installed at your site, you can make a typeset manual from `eshell.texi'.
dvi2ps, which does. There
is also a program which comes together with TeX, dvips, which
you can use.
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This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009
using texi2html 1.65.