MusePi

</p>

brush (Bo(u)rn(e) RUsty SHell) is a modern bash- and POSIX- compatible shell written in Rust. Run your existing scripts and .bashrc unchanged – with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions built in.

At a glance

✅ Your existing .bashrc just works—aliases, functions, completions, all of it.
✨ Syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions built in.
🧪 Validated against bash with ~1700 compatibility tests.
🧩 Easily embeddable in your Rust apps using brush_core::Shell.

⚠️ Not everything works yet: select and some edge cases aren’t supported. See the Compatibility Reference for details.

Quick start:

$ cargo binstall brush-shell         # using cargo-binstall
$ brew install brush                 # using Homebrew
$ pacman -S brush                    # Arch Linux
$ cargo install --locked brush-shell # Build from sources

brush is ready for use as a daily driver. We test every change against bash to keep it that way.

More detailed installation instructions are available below.

✨ Features

🐚 `bash` Compatibility

	Feature	Description
✅	50+ builtins	`echo`, `declare`, `read`, `complete`, `trap`, `ulimit`, …
✅	Full expansions	brace, parameter, arithmetic, command/process substitution, globs, `extglob`, `globstar`
✅	Control flow	`if`/`for`/`while`/`until`/`case`, `&&`/`\\|\\|`, subshells, pipelines, etc.
✅	Redirection	here docs, here strings, fd duplication, process substitution redirects
✅	Arrays & variables	indexed/associative arrays, dynamic variables, standard well-known variables, etc.
✅	Programmable completion	Works with bash-completion out of the box
✅	Job control	background jobs, suspend/resume, `fg`/`bg`/`jobs`
🔷	Traps & options	`DEBUG`/`ERR`/`EXIT` traps work; signal traps and options in progress

⌨️ User Experience

	Feature	Description
✅	Syntax highlighting	Real-time as you type (reedline)
✅	Auto-suggestions	History-based hints as you type (reedline)
✅	Rich prompts	`PS1`/`PROMPT_COMMAND`, right prompts, starship compatible
✅	TOML config	`~/.config/brush/config.toml` for persistent settings
🧪	Extras	`fzf`/`atuin` support, zsh-style `precmd`/`preexec` hooks (experimental), VS Code terminal integration

Installation

When you run brush, it should look exactly as bash does on your system: it processes your .bashrc and other standard configuration. If you’d like to distinguish the look of brush from the other shells on your system, you may author a ~/.brushrc file.

🍺 Installing using Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

Homebrew users can install using [the `brush` formula](https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/brush): ```bash brew install brush ```

🐧 Installing on Arch Linux

Arch Linux users can install `brush` from the official [extra repository](https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/brush/): ```bash pacman -S brush ```

🚀 Installing prebuilt binaries via `cargo binstall`

You may use [cargo binstall](https://github.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall) to install pre-built `brush` binaries. Once you've installed `cargo-binstall` you can run: ```bash cargo binstall brush-shell ```

🚀 Installing prebuilt binaries from GitHub

We publish prebuilt binaries of `brush` for Linux (x86_64, aarch64) and macOS (aarch64) to GitHub for official [releases](https://github.com/reubeno/brush/releases). You can manually download and extract the `brush` binary from one of the archives published there, or otherwise use the GitHub CLI to download it, e.g.: ```bash gh release download --repo reubeno/brush --pattern "brush-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.*" ``` After downloading the archive for your platform, you may verify its authenticity using the [GitHub CLI](https://cli.github.com/), e.g.: ```bash gh attestation verify brush-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz --repo reubeno/brush ```

🐧 Installing using Nix

If you are a Nix user, you can use the registered version: ```bash nix run 'github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable#brush' -- --version ```

🔨 Building from sources

To build from sources, first install a working (and recent) `rust` toolchain; we recommend installing it via [`rustup`](https://rustup.rs/). Then run: ```bash cargo install --locked brush-shell ```

Community & Contributing

This project started out of curiosity and a desire to learn—we’re keeping that attitude. If something doesn’t work the way you’d expect, let us know!

Discord server — chat with the community
Building from source — development workflow
Contribution guidelines — how to submit changes
Technical docs — architecture and reference

Other POSIX-ish shells implemented in non-C/C++ languages:

nushell — modern Rust shell (provides reedline)
fish — user-friendly shell (Rust port in 4.0)
Oils — bash-compatible with new Oil language
mvdan/sh — Go implementation
rusty_bash — another Rust bash-like shell

🙏 Credits

This project relies on many excellent OSS crates: * [`reedline`](https://github.com/nushell/reedline) — readline-like input and interactive features * [`clap`](https://github.com/clap-rs/clap) — command-line parsing * [`fancy-regex`](https://github.com/fancy-regex/fancy-regex) — regex support * [`tokio`](https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio) — async runtime * [`nix`](https://github.com/nix-rust/nix) — Unix/POSIX APIs * [`criterion.rs`](https://github.com/bheisler/criterion.rs) — benchmarking * [`bash-completion`](https://github.com/scop/bash-completion) — completion test suite

Licensed under the MIT license.