eev was featured in the issue #13 of Brave GNU World, written by Georg
Greve, that writes much better than me.

You can find the full issue at:

   http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-13.en.html

It's licensed as:
  Copyright (C) 2000 Georg C. F. Greve
  Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
  transcript as long as the copyright and this permission notice appear.

I'm not sure if it is OK to distribute only the eev article, I'll have
to ask Georg.




  eev

   Being confronted with eev [7] by Eduardo Ochs for the first time I
   must admit I felt the description was very vague and I couldn't really
   see what it would be good for. The eev manifesto [8] definitely helped
   but I only really got to see it after playing around with it. I hope
   to be able to make this experimental phase a little easier for you.

   Eev is an Emacs-LISP library that can be included in Emacs the
   standard way. After installation you can use it to to interpret the
   so-called "e-scripts." These are pure ASCII files which - just like
   normal shellscripts - contain a sequence of commands. It only becomes
   interesting once you don't just think of the scripts as a way to solve
   a problem. Their purpose is rather to show another user how certain
   problems can be solved under Unix. In order to do this, an e-script
   very often contains several solutions to one problem or solutions to
   different (preferrably related) problems - so it is hardly ever useful
   to interpret it as a whole.

   Using this is very easy. The e-script gets loaded into the Emacs and
   the user marks the part that is of interest to her/him. Afterwards
   this part is being interpreted by the "eev" command which creates a
   real shellscript that contains the commands of the marked region. The
   shellscript can then be run in Emacs' shell-mode; its output can be
   monitored in Emacs. So an e-script is a collection of several
   shellscripts that can be run by the user partially or even line by
   line.

   The best part about this is the idea to use the LISP capabilities of
   Emacs to document the e-scripts. Instead of cutting and pasting whole
   sections from man, info and webpages into the script, the
   documentation consists of LISP expressions that for instance open a
   manpage or jump to a certain point in an info file. These expressions
   can be interpreted with "C-x C-e" which makes Emacs visit the
   specified piece of information. So this is a kind of "hyperlink" in
   LISP. Even sourcecode references can be implemented easily this way.
   With the help of e-scripts you can not only see the solution to a
   problem, the way to this solution also captured in a lean and
   efficient way.

   So in fact this isn't really a complicated idea. It also allows to
   create an archive of solutions to certain standard problems on the net
   which could make learning Unix much easier for a lot of users. To
   achieve this it is planned to make eev a standard part of GNU Emacs
   and figure out how eev could be ported to other editors like "vi." The
   e-script database is already in the process of being created and
   Eduardo's plans to create scripts for the installation, usage and
   troubleshooting of Debian GNU/HURD as well as outfitting other Debian
   packages with e-scripts.



   [7] eev homepage http://angg.twu.net/emacs.html
   [8] eev manifesto http://angg.twu.net/eev-manifesto.html
