Take it back.

Shellhog is a fast Mac terminal where AI agents work on a copy of your folder. Keep what you like with ⌘A. Take the whole thing back with ⌘Z.

Get Shellhog for macOS How it works

essays — Shellhog

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shellhog

/ˈʃɛlhɒɡ/ · noun

A hedgehog that lives in your shell. It lets your AI agent dig around on a copy, and curls up around your real files.

Let the agent dig. Your files stay curled up safe.

Claude Code, Codex and the rest are great until they delete the wrong photo or rewrite a file you cared about. With Shellhog, nothing they do touches your real files until you say so. If you don't like what it did, it never happened.

Three shortcuts. That's the whole interface.

When the agent finishes, nothing pops up. The status bar says what changed and waits for you.

⌘A

Accept

The changes go into your real files, for good. Deleting a file or anything risky asks for Touch ID first.

⌘Z

Unwind

Before ⌘A, the copy is thrown away and your files never moved. After ⌘A, the accepted work is rolled back with one Touch ID.

⌘J

Status

The tree of your folder, with every changed file in place and bytes added and removed. Space leaves a file — or a whole folder — out, v shows the diff. Deleted a file after accepting it? Press r and the accepted version comes back.

How it works

Type claude in Shellhog as you would in any terminal. The protection steps in on its own.

A copy, instantly
The folder is cloned with APFS copy-on-write: it takes moments, and no extra disk until files change.
A sandbox
The agent runs under macOS Seatbelt. It can write to the copy and its own state, nowhere else.
A live count
The status bar shows each file the agent changes, with bytes added and removed, every second.
Your call
⌘A, ⌘Z or ⌘J. Every decision is written to a signed logbook on your Mac.

Not just AI. Any command, on a copy.

Put hog in front of anything you don't fully trust: an install script, a code mod, a cleanup you're not sure about. Same copy, same sandbox, same three shortcuts.

hog npm installRuns on a copy of the folder, without access to your SSH keys or browser data.
hog --offline ./install.shSame, with the network cut off: nothing can leave the copy. Local servers still work.
hog sh -c 'rm -rf build'Changed your mind? ⌘Z, and it never happened.

Built not to be fooled

The agent runs in your terminal, so it could try to imitate Shellhog. It can't.

Drawn outside the terminalThe status bar and the review screen are rendered by Shellhog itself, outside the grid any program can write to.

Your mark, not oursEvery Shellhog surface carries the mark you picked (🦔, 🦉, 🦊…). A program doesn't know it, so it can't fake it.

Touch ID for what mattersAccepting a deletion, or rolling back accepted work, is confirmed in the system's own Touch ID prompt, with the files named.

Everything stays on your MacShellhog's copy, logbook and keys stay local. The confirmation key lives in the Secure Enclave.

Secrets stay secretThe sandbox blocks ~/.ssh and browser profiles, and the agent cannot reach Shellhog's own service.

Honest when it can'tIf something cannot be rolled back, Shellhog says so and asks for nothing. No fake “done”.

And it's a faster terminal than Ghostty

Shellhog is a complete GPU terminal written in Rust, not a plugin. Same machine, same 160×50 window, median of runs.

Test	Ghostty 1.3.1	Shellhog
cat, ASCII	0.87 s	0.51 s
cat, UTF-8	0.94 s	0.78 s
cat, 24-bit colour	1.60 s	0.65 s
Window visible	229 ms	131 ms
First content on screen	261 ms	162 ms
vtebench	1 of 10	9 of 10

Measured on an Apple Silicon Mac, October 2026. Memory use isn't compared: the two terminals keep different scrollback.

Get Shellhog

For macOS 11 Big Sur and later, on Apple Silicon and Intel.

brew install macrosoft/tap/shellhog

The first public build is on its way. Come back soon — it will be a single download, or one line with Homebrew.