Why I built this

I hate Unix commands. ls, cd, rm, mv, cp — two- and three-letter cryptic abbreviations that made sense to someone in 1971 and have just been carried forward ever since because “that’s how it’s always been.” I wanted a shell where the commands actually describe what they do, without needing to memorize a decades-old convention. So instead of complaining about it, I designed my own command set and built an OS around it from the ground up.

ShellyForever (currently v0.1.1) is a 64-bit OS written completely from scratch in x86-64 NASM assembly. No C, no existing kernel, no BIOS libraries beyond boot-time disk/keyboard calls. It boots and runs on real hardware, not just in an emulator. The name’s a commitment, not just a name — I plan to keep updating it forever.

To be upfront about how this was built: the assembly code itself is almost entirely AI-written. My part was designing the shell and commands — what each one should be called, how it should behave, what made sense to me as the person who’d actually be typing them — then having the AI implement that in asm and iterating with it on bugs and logic.

How it’s built

• Bootloader (boot.asm) — 512-byte boot sector. Starts in 16-bit real mode, loads the kernel off disk, switches to 32-bit protected mode, builds its own minimal page tables, switches to 64-bit long mode, jumps into the kernel.
• Kernel (kernel.asm) — everything else:
  • A VGA text-mode driver (writes directly to 0xB8000) with scrolling
  • A polled PS/2 keyboard driver (decodes scancode set 1, handles shift, backspace, enter)
  • rush, the custom shell — prompt, line editor, a tokenizer that understands quoted strings, and a command dispatcher
  • An in-memory filesystem tree rooted at /home, with recursive copy/move/delete
  • A simple name = value int64 variable table
  • A built-in line editor for file content

The commands (no more ls/rm/cd)

Command	Example	What it does
cf	cf docs, cf ..	change folder
mkf	mkf docs	make a folder
mkfl	mkfl a.txt "text"	make a file with content (-force/-silent/-info/-test)
del	del a.txt	delete a file (requires auth)
rname	rname old.txt new.txt	rename a file or folder
owrite	owrite a.txt "new text"	overwrite a file’s content in place
cpy	cpy docs docs_backup	copy a file/folder (recursive)
mov	mov docs archive	move/rename a file/folder (recursive)
show	show "hi", show a	print a message or a variable
list	list	list current folder contents
view	view a.txt	print a file’s content
find	find notes.txt	search every drive for a name, print its path
lookfor	lookfor "todo" notes.txt	grep a file’s content, with optional line range
edit	edit a.txt	built-in text editor
<n> = <value>	a = 5	set a variable
rmv	rmv a	remove a variable
vars	vars	list all variables
calc	calc 1 + 2 * 3	evaluate a math expression
rr	rr script.rsh	run a rush script file
prs	prs, prs kill 1	list/kill running scripts
auth	auth sdown	elevate for one dangerous command
current	current	print current path
wipe	wipe	clear the screen
dscan	dscan	scan drives for existing volumes
fmt	fmt data	format a drive with a volume label
mount	mount data	mount a formatted drive under /data/
label	label old new	rename a mounted drive’s label
ali	ali gs list	create a command alias
alis	alis	list aliases
color	color cyan	change output text color
sync	sync	save the filesystem to disk
rboot	rboot	save and restart (requires auth)
sdown	sdown	save and shut down (requires auth)

Some quality-of-life extras: command history and scrollback (arrow keys), ; to chain commands on one line, ~ to pipe one command’s output into another, $ for comments, and .rsh script files for automation.

Known limitations

No interrupts yet (keyboard/disk are polled), no real memory allocator (flat identity-mapped first 2MB), no ACPI (shutdown uses emulator magic ports on QEMU/Bochs/VirtualBox, halts cleanly on real hardware/anything else), and fixed-size file/folder tables for now.

Code

https://github.com/TheServer-lab/ShellyForever

Happy to go deeper on the boot process, the on-disk filesystem format, or the AI-assisted workflow if people are curious. Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who’s done bare-metal x86-64 work.