signalHacker News Show HN2026-09-27
Show HN: Esh, English to Shell
esh translates plain English into shell commands using a large language model, supporting local Ollama and hosted providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. It outputs only the command, allowing clean composition with shell pipes and substitutions, and can execute commands with confirmation via --exec. Repeated requests are cached locally to avoid duplicate model calls, and the tool requires Rust 1.85 or newer.
- for who
- Developers and shell users who want to generate shell commands from natural language.
- why now
- New tool esh launches now, turning plain English into shell commands via multiple LLM providers.
- what changes
- They can quickly generate and run shell commands without memorizing syntax, using local or hosted LLMs.
- to do
- Install esh via cargo or prebuilt binaries and start issuing English-to-command queries.
key points
- Works with Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, any OpenAI-compatible API
- Prints only the command, enabling pipe, substitution, and capture
- Caches repeated requests; requires Rust 1.85 or newer
#natural language to command#llm#open source tool#shell integration
score
score 8 out of 10. 0-10: how dense the facts are, multiplied by how much you can do with them after reading. 8+ means the topic's evidence bar is met: benchmarks and availability for a new model, amount and investors for a funding round, revenue figures for a solo-money story. Below 5 an item does not enter the digest. A press release scores 3 or less, a reprint loses 2, anything older than 14 days loses 1, a headline that misleads loses 3.
read the source