IDE / Emacs mode for Shell scripting in Bash/Sh, etc

Well, there's a built-in shell mode that does syntax highlighting, if it's not already turned on, M-x shell-script-mode will do it for you.

Regarding a tool to make scripting easier. There's a bash shell debugger, so if you program in bash, that would help quite a bit.

Of course there's eshell, a shell written in Emacs lisp, so you can get all the syntax highlighting you'd expect from lisp, the auto-completion, and the emacs lisp debugger.


I don't think there is any mode for code completion for shell-scripts, at least not in Emacs. (I've actually never felt the need.) However, there is support in bash for completion when running interactively (the package is called "bash-completion", or something similar). This provides tab-completion for many shell-commands.


I know it is old post, but i will like to share my settings.

I had the same issue and now I use the code below in my .emacs file for sh/bash code autocompletion.

(require 'auto-complete)
(require 'auto-complete-config)
(ac-config-default)

The syntax highlighting should already work if you use a recent version of Emacs.


Another IDE for the VIM world:

Plugin bash-support.vim

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