ferrish — a modern, Rust-powered shell focused on safety, performance, and a clean interactive experience.
⚠️ Status: ferrish is in early development and is not yet ready for daily use.
Most shells in common use today were designed decades ago. While they are powerful, they also carry historical complexity, unsafe defaults, and difficult-to-maintain semantics.
ferrish explores what a shell can look like when it is:
- Built in Rust from the ground up
- Designed with safety and correctness as first-class goals
- Opinionated about clarity over cleverness
- Friendly to modern tooling and workflows
ferrish is not intended to be a drop-in replacement for existing shells. It is an experiment in better foundations.
ferrish is guided by a small set of principles that influence every design decision:
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Safety by default Avoid footguns, undefined behavior, and surprising side effects.
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Explicit over implicit Favor clear, readable behavior instead of clever but opaque magic.
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Predictable semantics The same input should always produce the same result.
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Composable, but understandable Pipelining and composition should remain powerful without becoming unreadable.
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Fast enough, then correct Performance matters, but never at the cost of correctness.
ferrish deliberately does not aim to:
- Be fully compatible with bash, zsh, or POSIX shell syntax
- Reimplement decades of legacy shell quirks
- Optimize for every possible one-liner at the cost of readability
- Replace existing shells overnight
Compatibility may be explored selectively, but only when it aligns with ferrish’s principles.
ferrish is in early development, and contributions are welcome once the core architecture begins to stabilize.
If you’re interested in contributing:
- Open an issue to discuss ideas before starting major work
- Keep changes focused and aligned with ferrish’s core principles
- Prefer clarity and correctness over clever optimizations
More detailed contribution guidelines may be added as the project matures.
Installation instructions will be added once ferrish reaches a usable milestone.
ferrish is licensed under the MIT License.