ccline

Type a thought directly at your shell prompt — no command, no prefix — and get an answer. If the answer contains shell commands, confirm once and run them.

$ how do I find files bigger than 100MB here

    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +100M       (rendered, colorized)

This lists files in the current directory only.

Commands found — ↑/↓ to choose, Enter to run, q to cancel:
 ❯ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +100M
   find . -type f -size +100M
   ➤ Run all of them
   ✗ Cancel
$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +100M
./big.iso

The answer is rendered as Markdown (headings, bold, inline code, bullets, and colorized code blocks) when printed to a terminal.

Why ccline?

You're in the terminal and need to remember a command. Your options:

• Leave the terminal to Google it, copy, paste back
• Open a new Claude window, ask, copy, paste back
• Open a new terminal tab, run claude -p "...", copy

With ccline: just type the question where you already are. The answer appears inline, and if there's a runnable command, one keypress executes it in your live shell — cd, export, history and all.

How it works

It hijacks zsh's command_not_found_handler. When you type something that isn't a real command, zsh hands the whole line to ccline:

• One word (gti) → treated as a normal typo: zsh: command not found: gti.
• Two or more words → treated as a thought, sent to your LLM CLI. The answer is rendered as Markdown. Any runnable commands are shown in an arrow-key menu — ↑/↓ to move, Enter to run the highlighted command (or "Run all of them"), q to cancel. When stdout isn't a terminal (piped/redirected), it falls back to a typed prompt (1-N, a=all, Enter=none).

It uses the claude CLI if installed (preferred), otherwise the codex CLI — auto-detected. Force one with CCLINE_BACKEND=claude or CCLINE_BACKEND=codex.

Markdown rendering uses glow if it's installed; otherwise a built-in perl renderer (no extra dependency).

Requirements

• zsh (the macOS default shell)
• One of these on your PATH, authenticated:
  • claude (preferred), or
  • codex (fallback)

Install

Homebrew (recommended for macOS):

brew install jianshuo/tap/ccline

Then add to ~/.zshrc:

source $(brew --prefix)/share/ccline/ccline.zsh

One-line install script:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jianshuo/ccline/v0.2.2/install.sh | bash

From a clone:

git clone https://github.com/jianshuo/ccline.git
cd ccline && ./install.sh

The install script puts ccline in ~/.local/bin, ccline.zsh in ~/.config/ccline/, and adds one source line to your ~/.zshrc. Re-running it is safe. Then open a new terminal (or source ~/.zshrc).

Configuration

• CCLINE_BACKEND — force the LLM CLI: claude or codex. Default is auto-detect (claude preferred, codex fallback).
• CCLINE_MODEL — override the model. The claude backend defaults to claude-sonnet-4-6 (fastest end-to-end for these short prompts); set this to use another, e.g. export CCLINE_MODEL=claude-opus-4-8. Passed as --model to whichever backend is used.

Running commands

When you trigger ccline by typing at the prompt (the normal path), the chosen command runs in your live shell — so cd, export, aliases, functions, and history all work and persist, exactly as if you'd typed it. (ccline writes the selection to a temp file and the zsh handler evals it.)

Running ccline … directly as a command instead runs the selection in a subprocess, so shell-state changes like cd won't persist there.

Limitations (v1)

• A bare * in a thought can glob-expand against the current directory. (A trailing ? is handled — the integration sets no_nomatch.)
• Single-word thoughts won't reach Claude — by design, so typos stay fast.

Uninstall

rm -f ~/.local/bin/ccline
rm -rf ~/.config/ccline

Then remove the # ccline block from ~/.zshrc.

Tests

bash tests/test_ccline.sh