Parolsh

Speak to your terminal. Natural language first.

Parolsh is a shell where natural language is the primary command language. What you type goes to an AI agent through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), and Bash stays one ! away.

[claude] ~/projects/wallet ✦ list the 10 most recently modified files     ← the agent
[claude] ~/projects/wallet ✦ !git status                                  ← bash
[claude] ~/projects/wallet ✦ !bash                                        ← a full Bash session
[claude] ~/projects/wallet ✦ #cd ~/projects/billing                       ← Parolsh itself

! alone locks plain text to bash (the prompt shows ❯), and ? alone unlocks it back to the agent (✦).

It runs inside your usual terminal emulator, prints to the normal scrollback (no full-screen UI), and works with any ACP agent: Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code, Gemini CLI, OpenCode and others.

The name comes from Esperanto parol- (to speak) + sh.

Early development — use with care

Parolsh is young software, and commands, configuration and behavior may still change between releases.

It hands your terminal to an AI agent. The agent can read files, edit them and run commands in your directory with your user's permissions, and it can be wrong. Read each permission request before you approve it, prefer the agent's more restrictive modes in directories you care about, and keep your work under version control. Anything you send with !+command goes to the agent's provider.

Input

Every line is routed by its first character. Nothing guesses whether you typed English or a command.

You type	What happens
text	Sent to the agent
/command	Sent to the agent unchanged (the agent's own slash commands)
!command	Run with bash -ic, in the current directory
!+command	Run the same way, and send its output with your next message
!bash	Interactive Bash session; exit returns to Parolsh
#command	Parolsh control command, see #help

See Input routing.

Install

Add the ByJG package repository, then:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install parolsh

# Fedora/RHEL
sudo dnf install parolsh

Packages are built for amd64 and arm64, and need glibc 2.28 or newer (Debian 10+, Ubuntu 20.04+, RHEL 8+).

On macOS (or Linux) with Homebrew:

brew install byjg/tap/parolsh

Homebrew builds it from source, installing Rust only for the build.

Then install an ACP agent, for example npm install -g @agentclientprotocol/claude-agent-acp, and run parolsh: the first run creates ~/.config/parolsh/config.toml with the agents it finds already enabled. See Getting started.

Documentation

• Getting started
• Agents
• Input routing
• Projects
• Configuration
• Security model
• Troubleshooting

Build from source

Requires Rust 1.88 or newer.

cargo build --release
./target/release/parolsh

Run the checks the CI runs:

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test

License

MIT

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Open source ByJG