IronShell

Welcome to the official IronShell documentation!

IronShell is a next-generation shell that combines the power of typed functional programming with multimodal AI capabilities. It’s designed for developers who want a shell that understands structure, not just text.

Why IronShell?

Traditional shells treat everything as text, leading to fragile scripts and endless string parsing. IronShell takes a different approach:

🔷 Typed Pipelines: Data flows as structured values (arrays, records, tables), not raw text
🧠 AI-Native: Built-in AI agents, multi-provider support, tool calling, and reasoning
⚡ Functional-First: Lambdas, pattern matching, and immutable-by-default semantics
🎨 Modern TUI: Rich terminal interface with multimodal content (images, charts)
🔌 Extensible: Plugin system, MCP protocol support, and Python/Node.js SDKs

Quick Example

# Type-safe pipelines
let files = ls "." 
  | where(fn(f) => f.size > 1000)
  | sort_by("modified")
  | take(5)

# AI-powered analysis  
let review = ai("Review this code for security issues:
" + cat("app.rs"))

# An agent, with the builtins it may call
agent("Find all TODO comments in src/", ["ls", "cat", "grep"])

Features at a Glance

Feature	Description
Typed Values	Int, Float, String, Bool, Array, Record, Table, Lambda
Pipeline Operators	`\|`, `\|>`, `?>` with full type inference
Pattern Matching	`match` expressions with guards and destructuring
AI Providers	20 provider types; OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Ollama have dedicated clients, the rest go over OpenAI-compatible endpoints
Agent Framework	Single agents with builtins as tools, over MCP or in-process
MCP	`ish mcp stdio` makes every builtin callable through a three-tool facade
Interactive TUI	Real-time chat and multimodal file references

Getting Started

Ready to dive in? Start with Installation to set up IronShell on your system.

If you’re coming from Bash or PowerShell, check out our Quick Start guide that translates common patterns to IronShell.

Community

GitHub: nervosys/IronShell
Issues: Report a bug or ask a question

License

IronShell is open source under the Apache 2.0 License.

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