Shell Pilot 1.21.0

September 5, 2026 · Feature release

Ask for a command in plain English and get a command line back. The # search has been rebuilt, and it now answers with 209 concrete, macOS-correct command lines instead of pointing at a command name and leaving you to work out the rest.

The one that started it

Typing #goback — meaning "go back to the directory I was just in" — returned nothing useful. Three things were wrong at once.

Search matched raw substrings, so goback never became two words; it hit the vocabulary entry go and answered with the Go programming language. Even spelled out, "go back" had no right answer to give, because the catalogue holds command names and the answer here is a whole line: cd -. And the single-letter vocabulary entry c fired on any query containing the letter c — the known limit written up in the 1.20.0 notes, which could not be removed safely while the ranking was still claiming each command for whichever term matched it first.

#goback now returns cd -, then popd, then cd ... So does #gobak.

How to use it

Type # at the prompt, then describe what you want in ordinary words — no flags, no command names to remember. Suggestions appear as you type; Tab or → inserts the command line into your prompt, ↑↓ move between them, Esc dismisses the list. Nothing runs until you press Return, so you can read the line, edit it, and decide.

Some lines contain a placeholder in angle brackets — <port>, <file>, <package>. Those are yours to fill in: the placeholder is inserted literally, so replace it before you run the line.

What you get back

209 recipes

Each recipe is a real command line paired with several ways of asking for it, so you do not have to guess the phrasing. They cover navigation, files and permissions, searching, processes and ports, system health, networking, archives, text handling, shell basics, git, package managers, macOS conveniences, and docker and kubectl. Accepting one inserts the line exactly as written.

It understands how people actually type

• Run-together words are split. goback → go back, undocommit → undo commit, killport → kill port.
• Typos are forgiven. gobak and previus reach the same answers as the correct spellings.
• Synonyms expand on whole words only. The letter c no longer drags in clang, gcc and make; that vocabulary entry is gone, and the 1.20.0 known limit with it. #bisect returns git bisect.
• Ranking is by tokens, not substrings. Every recipe and help page competes in one scoring pass weighted by how much of your query it actually explains, so a stray letter cannot outrank a real match.
• Same query, same order, every time — and a search stays under 5 ms.

Linux tools are still there when you name them

Commands that do not exist on a stock Mac — ip, strace, ltrace, readelf, and the apt / yum / dnf / pacman / systemctl family — are ranked lower for plain-English questions, so #whats my ip answers with the Mac's own ipconfig getifaddr en0 and #install package answers with brew. They are not removed: ask for one by name and you get it, because Shell Pilot is used over SSH and those pages earn their place on the far end of the connection. #ip still returns the ip page first.

Tests

342 tests pass across 27 suites, up from 321 in 26. The new SemanticSearchTests suite covers word segmentation, misspellings, the git undo / stash / bisect rankings, ports, disk space, system health, "whats my ip", the bare #ip page, macOS-first package installation, determinism, and the performance budget.

Known limits

• The app is not notarized, so a first install still shows a Gatekeeper prompt.
• Recipes are curated, not generated. These 209 lines were written and checked by hand rather than produced on demand, which is why they are correct — but it also means an intent nobody has written down yet has no answer. If a reasonable question comes back with nothing, the catalogue is missing a line rather than the search being broken.
• Placeholders such as <port> and <file> are inserted literally. Shell Pilot does not guess what you meant to put there; fill them in before running the line.