Small comment on es.

[Noah Friedman <friedman@splode.com>]

>	No filename completion, (this is a very nice feature of bash)

You can get this from readline or other command-line editing libraries that
link with es.

>Job control might be an issue for some people, too.

Yes, I agree.  Purists say job control is a bad idea, and I have no comment
on the purity of the concept.  But as a practical matter, they are just
wrong.  Ideal or not in principle, clean to implement or not, availability
of window system or not (!), job control is still an absolute requirement.
The lack of job control is the main thing which has kept me from converting
away from bash for normal shell use, and I've been too lame to sit down and
implement it.  I'm so lame I haven't even upgraded from es 0.84.

>But to the question: Why is the number of people using the "es" so small?

How many unix users care about, let alone understand the concepts of, first
class procedures and lexical scope?  Besides a few Scheme and ML
malcontents?  :-)

>	What are common hacks to get "es" closer to my favorite shell [tm]?
>		(Maybe to get a nice prompt?)

I've got a couple of hacks, including a replacement repl.
See the file es/lib/repl.es (and many accompanying library files) in 
ftp://ftp.splode.com/pub/friedman/inits/es-init-4.104.tar.gz

This stuff may not work correctly in the 0.90 alpha versions of es.  I'm
still using 0.84.