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.
A hedgehog that lives in your shell. It lets your AI agent dig around on a copy, and curls up around your real files.
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.
When the agent finishes, nothing pops up. The status bar says what changed and waits for you.
The changes go into your real files, for good. Deleting a file or anything risky asks for Touch ID first.
Before ⌘A, the copy is thrown away and your files never moved. After ⌘A, the accepted work is rolled back with one Touch ID.
One line per changed file, with bytes added and removed. Press Space on a file to leave it out, v to read the diff. Deleted a file after accepting it? Press r and the accepted version comes back.
Type claude in Shellhog as you would in any terminal. The protection steps in on its own.
The folder is cloned with APFS copy-on-write: it takes moments, and no extra disk until files change.
The agent runs under macOS Seatbelt. It can write to the copy and its own state, nowhere else.
The status bar shows each file the agent changes, with bytes added and removed, every second.
⌘A, ⌘Z or ⌘J. Every decision is written to a signed logbook on your Mac.
The agent runs in your terminal, so it could try to imitate Shellhog. It can't.
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.
Private preview for macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon.
claude "fix the typos in letter.txt" # then ⌘A, ⌘Z or ⌘J