[ESS] feature request: shell support

[Andreas Leha]

Hi all,

I have to do a lot of shell scripting lately and compared to R scripting
in ess, this feels quite uncomfortable.

There is essh [fn:1] (*many thanks* to the creator), which I use a
lot right now and which improves the experience quite a bit.

Compared to ess (which I only use for R) it lags behind a lot, though.

Just a few examples:
- ess improved a lot in handling multiple *R* buffers, where it now
  handles them using the buffer name (instead of *R <2>*).  essh still
  asks for *shell<2>*.
- essh does not remember an associated *shell* buffer.  Instead with
  multiple open *shell* buffers it asks for the one to use with every
  line I sent to the buffer.
- essh (by default) still uses the 'old' C-c C-n eval commands instead
  of ess's new C-RET.


Of course these are all fixable in my config or directly in essh.

But here is my question to ess: Would it be possible to add that/similar
support for shell into ess?  My hope is: That way, the shell support
would immediately profit from all the ess improvements.

I am sure there are more people (e.g. in bioinformatics) who have to
work quite a bit on the command line or shell scripts and are happy
users of ess.  These people (e.g. myself) would *love* to see shell
support in ess.

Regards,
Andreas

Footnotes:

[fn:1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/essh.el