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Those very basic operations work, but it's not feasible yet to use it exclusively as a shell and be able to do anything moderately complex without getting fancy with subprocesses and so on. Though, it's been a while since I used it (2 years) -- have things changed significantly in this time that now make it a good candidate to use as a command-line terminal?

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Precede any command by "!" and it sends it to bash, you can use git etc. like this.

Cool, I didn't know this.

However, still I wonder if that's enough. I mean, I can imagine that could get annoying really fast considering ! is a little tough to get to on the keyboard. Maybe a modal switch (a la vim, a mode for full blown shell, a mode with IPython being normal IPython) is a good option.

I really hope something like this eventually works out. Command-line shells seem too much like relics of the past, they can stand to be improved with some of the new UI sensibilities. IPython is one thing I can think of that is poised to fit and interact well with shells.

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/shell.html

Check that out, I think that's along the lines you are thinking.

You can also make a whole cell be in bash with %%bash.

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