There's eshell, shell and term, each with tradeoffs (see on of my other comments). I have an external terminal running tmux and a bunch of curses programs (wicd

There's eshell, shell and term, each with tradeoffs (see on of my other comments). I have an external terminal running tmux and a bunch of curses programs (wicd-curses, alsamixer and cmus) but do everything else in shell mode or eshell mode. To me, the killer feature of shell mode is the ability to manipulate the buffer contents like any other file. The killer feature of eshell is its built-in TRAMP support, for manipulating and opening remote files transparently. Eshell's lack of pipes makes shell mode my default though.