TITAN Bash

Modern interactive shell for Windows. No more Git Bash pain.

Scope: TITAN Bash is bash-inspired, but it is not GNU bash and it is not a POSIX shell.

TITAN Bash is a Windows-native terminal host for running Windows tools reliably (git, node, cargo, npm, AI CLIs, dev servers), with a small set of bash-like interactive operators (|, redirects, &&, ||, ;, background jobs).

To make common “Unixy” commands available out-of-the-box, Windows releases bundle busybox-w32 as tools\busybox.exe (providing applets like grep, sed, awk, find, tar, gzip, ...).

What this is (and isn’t)

TITAN Bash is:

• A Windows-native interactive host for Windows-native CLI tools
• A lightweight bash-like operator layer (pipelines/redirects/conditionals/jobs)
• Windows reality-first: long paths, UNC paths, reserved device names

TITAN Bash is not:

• A bash interpreter (no #!/bin/bash, if/for, functions, [[ ... ]], etc.)
• A Linux environment (use WSL when you need Linux semantics or real bash scripting)

Features

• Reliable Ctrl+C: interrupt child processes without killing titanbash
• Tab completion: builtins + PATH executables + bundled BusyBox applets
• History search: Ctrl+R reverse search
• Streaming pipes & redirects: |, >, >>, 2>, 2>>, |&, 2>&1
• Windows script dispatch: .cmd/.bat via cmd.exe, .ps1 via PowerShell
• Background jobs: command & + jobs + fg/wait/kill
• Python venv: venv\Scripts\activate / activate / deactivate (updates PATH + shows (venv) in prompt)
• Path normalization: supports C:\..., C:/..., /c/..., ~, ~user where appropriate

Installation

Releases ship two formats:

• Installer: titan-bash-setup-<version>.exe (installs and can add to PATH)
• Portable (full): titanbash-<version>-portable.zip (recommended; includes tools\busybox.exe)

Or build from source:

cargo build --release
.\target\release\titanbash.exe

Packaging maintainers: see PACKAGING.md.

Usage

# Interactive shell
titanbash

# Single command
titanbash -c "ls -la"

# Run Windows scripts directly
titanbash deploy.ps1
titanbash build.cmd

Built-in commands

TITAN Bash includes a small set of built-ins (so cd works like a real shell and path handling is consistent):

• cd, pwd, ls, cat, echo, clear, help, history
• activate, deactivate (Python venv)
• mkdir, rm, cp, mv, touch
• alias, unalias, export, env/printenv, which
• jobs, fg, wait, kill
• md5sum, sha1sum, sha256sum, sha512sum

Bundled BusyBox tools

Windows releases bundle busybox-w32 as tools\busybox.exe.

• Run any applet directly (TITAN Bash will dispatch unknown commands to BusyBox when appropriate): grep, sed, awk, find, tar, ...
• List available applets: busybox --list

See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for BusyBox license/source links.

Multi-line paste

TITAN Bash enables “bracketed paste mode” in compatible terminals (Windows Terminal / VS Code), so multi-line pastes are treated as input and do not require a separate confirmation prompt.

If your terminal host still prompts on multi-line paste, you can disable it in the host settings:

• Windows Terminal: "multiLinePasteWarning": false
• VS Code: disable “Terminal: Enable Multi Line Paste Warning”

License

MIT (see LICENSE). Third-party components: see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.