The Shell icon, like the Notes editor is also a plain text editor. It is used to write UNIX shell scripts which can then be executed from within Metview or Metview Macro. Any ASCII file beginning with #!/bin/ksh (or equivalent) brought into the metview directory (or one of its subdirectories) is automatically assigned a Shell icon.
From Macro/Python the icon can be called as shell().
The Shell Script Editor
The Shell icon is a plain text editor.