Interactive Mode

Start agsh without the -p flag to enter interactive mode:

agsh

You get a prompt:

agsh [r] >

Type your instruction and press Enter to submit. The agent processes your request and prints its response (streamed in real time as Markdown). When it finishes, you get another prompt.

Keybindings

agsh uses Emacs-style keybindings (provided by reedline).

Input

Key	Action
Enter	Submit the current prompt
Alt+Enter	Insert a newline (for multi-line input)
Shift+Tab	Cycle the permission mode (none → read → ask → write → none)

Key	Action
Ctrl+A	Move cursor to start of line
Ctrl+E	Move cursor to end of line
Ctrl+F	Move cursor forward one character
Ctrl+B	Move cursor backward one character
Alt+F	Move cursor forward one word
Alt+B	Move cursor backward one word

Editing

Key	Action
Ctrl+D	Delete character under cursor / exit on empty line
Ctrl+H, Backspace	Delete character before cursor
Ctrl+K	Kill text from cursor to end of line
Ctrl+U	Kill text from start of line to cursor
Ctrl+W	Kill word before cursor
Ctrl+Y	Yank (paste) killed text

Control

Key	Action
Ctrl+C	Interrupt the running agent; clear the line if idle
Ctrl+D	Exit the shell (when the line is empty)
Ctrl+R	Reverse incremental search through history
Ctrl+L	Clear the screen

Prompt Format

agsh [indicator] >

The indicator shows the current permission mode:

Mode	Indicator	Color
None	`[n]`	Green
Read	`[r]`	Yellow
Ask	`[a]`	Magenta
Write	`[w]`	Red

The color provides a visual cue about the agent’s current capabilities. Red means the agent can modify your system.

Multi-Line Input

Press Alt+Enter to insert a newline instead of submitting. The prompt changes to show continuation:

agsh [r] > write a python script that
  ... prints hello world
  ... and saves it to hello.py

Press Enter on the last line to submit the entire multi-line input.

Pasting multi-line content also works seamlessly — all pasted lines appear in the buffer for review, and you press Enter to submit.

Slash Commands

agsh supports / prefix commands for controlling the shell:

Command	Description
`/help`	Show available commands
`/exit`	Exit the shell
`/clear`	Clear the terminal screen
`/session`	Show the current session ID
`/permission [none\|read\|ask\|write]`	Show or set the permission level
`/compact`	Summarize and compact the session history
`/cd [path]`	Change working directory
`/mcp list`	List configured MCP servers with their live state (`pending` / `connected` / `failed` / `disabled`)
`/mcp reconnect <server>`	Smoke-test connect for one server
`/mcp login <server>`	Run the OAuth flow from the REPL
`/mcp logout <server>`	Revoke cached credentials for a server
`/mcp <server>:<prompt> [args...]`	Render a server-defined prompt and send it to the agent

The /compact command asks the LLM to summarize the entire conversation, then replaces the message history with a single summary message. This is useful for long sessions that are approaching the context window limit or becoming expensive.

After compacting, the session continues with the summary as context. The previous messages are removed from both memory and the database.

Shell Escape

Prefix any input with ! to execute it directly as a shell command, bypassing the LLM entirely:

agsh [r] > !pwd
/home/user/projects
agsh [r] > !ls -la
total 32
drwxr-xr-x  5 user user 4096 Mar  4 10:00 .
...
agsh [r] > !ping 1.1.1.1 -c 2
PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
...

The command runs with inherited stdin/stdout/stderr, so it behaves exactly like a regular shell. This is useful for quick checks without waiting for the LLM.

Exiting

You can exit agsh in any of these ways:

Type /exit
Type exit or quit
Press Ctrl+D on an empty line

Interrupting the Agent

Press Ctrl+C while the agent is running to interrupt it. This cancels the current LLM request and kills any running shell commands that were spawned by the agent.

agsh