shelly

Your terminal sessions, from anywhere.

Shelly runs a real PTY on your laptop and lets paired mobile clients continue the same terminal session without losing process state. Commands such as bash, zsh, vim, htop, python, node, lazygit, claude, and codex keep running on the host while clients attach, detach, resize, and reconnect.

Install

npm i -g shellykit

The unscoped shellykit package is the v1 desktop install and update path. It installs these commands:

• shelly: the user-facing CLI
• shellyd: the local daemon that owns PTYs, pairing, replay, and transport

Use npm to update installed builds:

npm update -g shellykit

First Run

shelly daemon install
shelly pair
shelly
shelly refactoringjob
shelly new --name shell bash
shelly new bash
shelly attach <session-id>
shelly kill <session-id-or-name>
shelly kill-all
shelly completion bash

shelly pair starts QR pairing. Running shelly with no subcommand creates and attaches a new shell-backed Shelly session every time, with a generated one-word name like waffle or kazoo even when other sessions already exist. From that shell the user can start Claude, exit it, start Codex, or run any other terminal program inside the same Shelly session. Running shelly new bash, shelly new claude, or any new command without --name keeps the requested command and still chooses a generated one-word session name. Running shelly refactoringjob attaches that named session when it exists, or creates and attaches a shell-backed Shelly PTY named refactoringjob when it does not. The same daemon session name appears in the mobile app dashboard. Use shelly kill <session-id-or-name> to stop one Shelly session and shelly kill-all to stop all current sessions.

shelly --help prints Usage: shelly, and shelly completion bash generates a completion script for the shelly command.

The default desktop command is the user's shell, and arbitrary PTY commands are supported. Mobile clients can pair, list sessions, attach, send input, resize, detach, and register push tokens. Mobile clients cannot create or kill sessions. The desktop CLI talks to the daemon over the local Unix socket; iroh is reserved for paired mobile clients.

Package Layout

This meta-package depends on exactly one platform package at install time:

• shellykit-darwin-arm64
• shellykit-darwin-x64
• shellykit-linux-arm64
• shellykit-linux-x64

When postinstall scripts are allowed, the matching platform package swaps bin/shelly and bin/shellyd to native binaries. When scripts are disabled, the shipped dispatchers still run the matching platform binaries. v1 Windows host support is through the Linux package inside WSL2.

Local persistence is encrypted by default with an OS-keychain-held key unless the user explicitly opts out. Keychain prompts are only for local key material; terminal output, keystrokes, commands, paths, session names, and push tokens are not stored there. Shelly push payloads are privacy-preserving and do not include terminal content, commands, paths, or session names.