shelloveu — A Shell You Actually Want to Use

What if your shell came with batteries included?

shelloveu is a Unix shell I wrote from scratch in C++17. Not a wrapper around bash. Not a plugin for zsh. A full shell — tokenizer, parser, pipeline executor, job control — built on GNU Readline and designed to be something you'd actually want as your daily driver.

But the shell is just the beginning. shelloveu ships with a built-in file manager, a text editor, a sixel image viewer, and yes — a hidden dinosaur runner game. All in one binary.

The Shell

At its core, shelloveu handles everything you'd expect from a real shell — and then some:

• Pipelines — cat log.txt | grep ERROR | sort | uniq -c
• Redirections — <, >, >>, 2>, &>, heredocs (<<), fd duplication (2>&1)
• Globs — *.txt, file?.log, [a-z]*
• Variable expansion — $VAR, ${VAR}, $?, $$, plus export/unset
• Command substitution — $(...) and backticks
• Control flow — ;, &&, ||
• Scripting — if/for/while/until, break/continue, functions with positional params
• Job control — background jobs, fg/bg/kill, %N references, Ctrl-Z suspend
• Live syntax highlighting and history autosuggestions as you type
• Tab completion for builtins, aliases, and $PATH commands
• Structured history — every command is logged to ~/.shelloveu/history.jsonl with timestamps, working directory, exit code, and duration

The prompt is themeable and git-aware — it shows your current directory, branch, last exit code, and how many background jobs are running.

Safety fuse

Run rm -rf / by accident? shelloveu catches dangerous rm patterns before they execute. Toggle it with set safety=on in your ~/.shelloveurc.

The File Manager — fm

Type fm and you drop into a ranger-style two-pane TUI. Directory listing on the left, live file preview on the right. Navigate with arrow keys or hjkl (vim-style):

That last part is key: when you quit fm, your shell's working directory changes to wherever you navigated. No more cd-ing after you find what you're looking for.

The Text Editor — edit

Type edit myfile.txt and you get a full-screen terminal editor in the spirit of kilo. It's not vim and it's not trying to be — it's a clean, distraction-free editor for quick edits:

• Tab-aware rendering with horizontal and vertical scrolling
• Status bar with filename, modified flag, line count, and cursor position
• Ctrl-S to save (prompts for a filename on new buffers)
• Ctrl-Q to quit (warns once if you have unsaved changes)
• Home / End / PgUp / PgDn navigation

Set export EDITOR=edit and the file manager will open files in it automatically.

The Image Viewer

Browse to an image in fm and it renders right in your terminal. shelloveu supports two rendering backends:

• Sixel graphics — real pixel-resolution images with 256-color median-cut quantization, Floyd-Steinberg dithering, and run-length encoding. Works in Windows Terminal 1.22+, xterm, foot, and mlterm.
• Half-block fallback — uses the ▀ character with 24-bit foreground/background colors. Two pixels per cell. Works everywhere.

For JPEGs, it even parses EXIF data and shows you camera model, date taken, and exposure info. EXIF orientation is applied automatically.

The Dinosaur Game

Type dino and shelloveu launches a Chrome-dinosaur-style ASCII runner. Jump cacti with Space, Up, or W. The game speeds up the longer you survive, and your high score is saved to ~/.shelloveu/dino_highscore.

It's completely pointless and I love it.

Getting Started

Install

# Prerequisites
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y build-essential g++ libreadline-dev

# Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/rndxdev/shelloveu.git
cd shelloveu
make

Run

./shelloveu                 # interactive mode
./shelloveu -c "ls | wc -l" # single command
./shelloveu -f script.txt   # run a script

Configure

Create a ~/.shelloveurc to customize your experience:

set safety=on              # rm -rf protection
set fun_prompt=on          # playful prompt style
set prompt_symbol=>>        # change the prompt character
set banner=off             # hide the startup dino
alias ll="ls -la"
alias gs="git status"

Quick tour

fm                         # launch the file manager
edit notes.txt             # open the text editor
dino                       # play the dinosaur game
hist 20                    # show last 20 commands with metadata
please                     # re-run last command with sudo
mkcd new-project           # mkdir + cd in one shot

Why Build a Shell?

Because nothing teaches you how Unix works like implementing it yourself. Every pipe is a fork + exec + dup2. Every redirect is an open + file descriptor shuffle. Every background job is a process group you have to track, wait on, and report.

shelloveu started as an Operating Systems course project and grew into something I actually use. Globs, &&/|| chaining, fg/bg, scripting, syntax highlighting, autosuggestions — all shipped. Every feature is something I built because I wanted it.

Check it out on GitHub and give it a spin.