Eshell was only really useful for moving text between Emacs and external processes and in order to have a reasonably sensible shell on things like Windows 2000

Eshell was only really useful for moving text between Emacs and external processes and in order to have a reasonably sensible shell on things like Windows 2000 boxes (it was never meant as a replacement for a system shell, but honestly, anything was good a replacement for cmd.exe). From the manual: > Eshell is not a replacement for system shells such as bash or zsh. Use Eshell when you want to move text between Emacs and external processes; if you only want to pipe output from one external process to another (and then another, and so on), use a system shell, because Emacs's IO system is buffer oriented, not stream oriented, and is very inefficient at such tasks. If you want to write shell scripts in Eshell, don't; either write an elisp library or use a system shell. So... there's a pretty tiny subset of people who need eshell, I guess. Most of the eshell users I know are either folks who got used to it from weird environments, or folks who just use emacs for everything so using it for their shell stuff, too, sort of makes sense.