wolysh (wsh)

A fast, readable Linux shell for developers and agent workflows.

wolysh combines everyday Linux commands with a readable scripting language. Commands stay commands; arithmetic, conditions, loops, and functions get their own syntax. It is written in Zig and uses native Linux process and job control.

Download

Get the latest Linux x86_64 release

The release archive includes the shell, examples, license, and checksum.

Interactive prompt

Why wolysh

• Run familiar commands, pipes, redirects, and globs.
• Merge stderr with stdout, feed commands with here-documents, and isolate work in subshells.
• Write scripts with expressions, if, loops, and functions.
• Use built-in completion, syntax highlighting, history suggestions, and Ctrl-R.
• Get typo suggestions with a Bloom-style prefilter; normal command lookup skips fuzzy work.
• Cache recent misses for fast inline corrections on the next attempt.
• Use quick la and lh shortcuts for common ls options.
• Manage foreground/background jobs with Ctrl-Z, bg, and fg.
• Run independent tasks with native parallel -j N, fail-fast queueing, and JSONL task reports.
• Check generated scripts with wsh --check before executing them.

let workers = 4 * 2
if workers > 4 {
    print "Building with $workers workers"
    cargo build --jobs $workers
}

Performance snapshot

Measurements are from one development machine, not a standardized benchmark. The loop result covers this 20,000-iteration workload; results vary by machine and workload.

The repeatable benchmark suite compares the current worktree, the previous release, and Bash with interleaved samples. It covers startup, arithmetic, external commands, pipelines, event-driven waits, and bounded parallel tasks.

Agent and developer workflows

Build once with zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast, then invoke the native binary directly. Non-interactive commands skip prompt, history, and config loading:

./zig-out/bin/wsh --check script.wsh
./zig-out/bin/wsh --no-config -c "parallel -j 2 --fail-fast --report checks.jsonl 'zig build check' 'zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast'"

parallel runs Wolysh command strings in isolated child processes, inherits functions and variables, and refills a slot as soon as a task finishes. Reports record task indexes, exit statuses, and elapsed times separately from command output. See the agent workflow guide for the contract and examples.

Build from source

Linux x86_64 is the currently tested target. Building requires Zig 0.16.0:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
./zig-out/bin/wsh

To install the source build, run sudo install -m 0755 zig-out/bin/wsh /usr/local/bin/wsh.

For a user-local installation without sudo:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast --prefix "$HOME/.local"
"$HOME/.local/bin/wsh" --version

Add $HOME/.local/bin to your existing shell's PATH if it is not already there.

Project status

Early stage and not yet a Bash drop-in. POSIX and Bash control flow (case, until, [[ ]], (( )), C-style for), functions, indexed and associative arrays, Bash parameter expansion, process substitution, extended globbing, set -euo pipefail and traps are implemented and compared against Bash in the test suite. See the language guide for features, configuration, key bindings, and the remaining differences.

Recent changes are recorded in the changelog.

• Contributing
• Security policy
• Demo script

License

MIT. See LICENSE.