The IDLWAVE shell is an Emacs major mode which permits running the IDL program as an inferior process of Emacs, and works closely with the IDLWAVE major mode in buffers. It can be used to work with IDL interactively, to compile and run IDL programs in Emacs buffers and to debug these programs. The IDLWAVE shell is built on comint, an Emacs packages which handles the communication with the IDL program. Unfortunately, IDL for Windows does not have command-prompt versions and thus do not allow the interaction with Emacs, so the IDLWAVE shell currently works under only Unix and macOS.