How prevalent is the use of Emacs' eshell in multi-platform development?

Question

I've only recently become aware of Emacs' eshell tool. It looks quite powerful in that it is entirely written in Emacs Lisp and does not require native subshell support. The Emacs info documentation is a bit sparse but EmacsWiki has pretty decent information, at least on a first glance.

Given the potential value of eshell as a scripting tool/programmer's aid that works equally well on multiple platforms I'm wondering how prevalent the use of eshell versus the normal (bash) shell is among software developers. Would those of you who have taken the time to learn it recommend it or is it one of those many interesting ideas that did not really pan out?

Answer 1

My personal opinion is that eshell is valuable only on non-unix platforms. Although it has a fairly rich feature set and the ability to interpret Emacs Lisp code(which is greatest strength for me) - it is poorly documented and lacks many of the capabilities of bash and zsh for instance.

I have spent some time learning it and trying to use it exclusively, but in the end I've opted for my much more powerful zsh.