"the shell" usually means (on modern Linux distros) bash, which is the "GNU Bourne-Again SHell".[0] Brian Fox[1] developed the readline library to handle bash'

"the shell" usually means (on modern Linux distros) bash, which is the "GNU Bourne-Again SHell".[0] Brian Fox[1] developed the readline library to handle bash's interactive input. Between Brian Fox having been an Emacs maintainer, and bash being a GNU project, the keybindings followed suit... Had bash been "Bill Joy's[2] Awesome SHell," things might have gone differently :-) Well, it would've just been csh[3] (written by Bill Joy.) [0] I address this introduction to anyone not already "in the know." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell