Shell – the difference between shell, eshell, and term in Emacs

emacsshell

In Emacs I can run a shell using following commands – 

M-x term

M-x shell

M-x eshell

What is the difference between these three?

Best Answer

shell is the oldest of these 3 choices. It uses Emacs's comint-mode to run a subshell (e.g. bash). In this mode, you're using Emacs to edit a command line. The subprocess doesn't see any input until you press Enter. Emacs is acting like a dumb terminal. It does support color codes, but not things like moving the cursor around, so you can't run curses-based applications.

term is a terminal emulator written in Emacs Lisp. In this mode, the keys you press are sent directly to the subprocess; you're using whatever line editing capabilities the shell presents, not Emacs's. It also allows you to run programs that use advanced terminal capabilities like cursor movement (e.g. you could run nano or less inside Emacs).

eshell is a shell implemented directly in Emacs Lisp. You're not running bash or any other shell as a subprocess. As a result, the syntax is not quite the same as bash or sh. It allows things like redirecting the output of a process directly to an Emacs buffer (try echo hello >#<buffer results>).

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