Shannon

An AI-first shell with seamless access to bash, nushell, and any other shell — all in one session.

Named after Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.

The Idea

Nobody remembers every shell command. Shannon lets you type in plain English and have an LLM translate your intent into the right command. When you need precise control, press Shift+Tab to drop into bash, nushell, or any other shell — then Shift+Tab back.

[nu] ~/project >                    ← press Enter on empty line
[nu:ai] ~/project > find all rust files modified today
  → fd --extension rs --changed-within 1d
  [Enter] run  [Esc] cancel

[nu] ~/project > <Shift+Tab>

[bash] ~/project > grep -r "TODO" src/
...
[bash] ~/project > <Shift+Tab>

[fish] ~/project > ls | head -5
...

Features

AI Mode

• Press Enter on empty line to toggle AI mode
• Type in plain English — an LLM generates the shell command
• Configurable provider (Anthropic by default)
• Review and confirm before execution
• Context-aware — the LLM knows your shell, cwd, and OS
• Conversational within a session — follow-up questions remember context

Poly-Shell

• Shift+Tab to cycle between shells (bash, nushell, fish, zsh)
• Nushell embedded — nushell runs natively via library, not as a subprocess
• Syntax highlighting for each shell (Tokyo Night theme, tree-sitter)
• Command-aware tab completion — 983 commands with subcommands and flags
• Autosuggestions — ghost text from history as you type
• SQLite history — shared across shells and instances, cross-session
• Vi keybindings by default
• Environment variables, cwd, and exit code synchronized across shell switches
• Configurable — add any shell via config.toml, no recompilation
• Terminal integration — OSC 2 (title) and OSC 7 (cwd) for tab titles and new-pane-in-same-directory
• Not a new language — zero new syntax to learn

Nushell as a First-Class Citizen

Nushell is embedded via its crate API (eval_source), not wrapped in a subprocess. This means:

• pwd, ls, and other builtins auto-print their results
• Interactive programs like vim and htop work correctly
• Nushell variables and functions persist across commands
• No system nu binary required — nushell is always available

Configuration

Shannon uses ~/.config/shannon/ (respects XDG_CONFIG_HOME):

No config files are required — shannon works out of the box.

Example config.toml

toggle = ["nu", "bash"]

[ai]
model = "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"

See the documentation for full config options.

Building

Requires Rust.

cargo build --release
./scripts/install.sh

License

MIT