[efitz]

If it's Python, is it really a new tool?

The big problem is that bash is more or less portable (almost everything has bash in the box). They need to start convincing distros to include and/or default xonsh, to really make it worthwhile.

[qwertox]

In my view, yes. It would allow you to extend you shell easily, for example do something with the history, like setting a blacklist for commands that should not appear in the history when using the up key, but still retaining the execution of such a command in the history for poor man's auditing.