com.soflution/kilnshell

Your whole machine, for AI agents. Without the wait.

Terminal, files, code search, long-running processes, PDF, Excel and Word, over MCP.
Everything Desktop Commander does, up to 100x faster per call, with no telemetry and nothing injected into your agent's context.

Benchmark

MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon), macOS, zsh with a typical developer profile (Homebrew and nvm), Node 25, median of 9 calls over real MCP stdio, telemetry turned off in the Desktop Commander config. The command speed-up depends on your shell profile: the heavier it is, the bigger the gain. On a bare Linux machine with an empty profile, commands are about 3x faster and file tools 3x to 6x faster.

Reproduce it on your machine:

git clone https://github.com/Soflutionltd/kilnshell && cd kilnshell
npm install
npm run bench        # installs Desktop Commander 0.3.1 next to it, runs both, redraws the chart

What changed, and why it is faster

Kilnshell started as a clone of Desktop Commander 0.3.1, profiled call by call.

1. The shell profile is read once, not on every command. Desktop Commander starts every command as zsh -l -c ..., so a profile that loads nvm, pyenv or Homebrew costs 0.5 to 1 s per command. Kilnshell runs the login profile once at start-up, keeps the environment it produces (same PATH, same variables) and starts each command with zsh -c. Set DESKTOP_COMMANDER_LOGIN_ENV_CACHE=0 to get a fresh login shell every time.
2. No process is spawned behind your back on every call. Telemetry rebuilt its system report for each tool call, which ran python3 --version synchronously and froze the server for 10 to 25 ms, even with telemetry turned off. System facts are now computed once.
3. Line counting uses native string scanning. Reading, editing and inspecting a file counted its lines character by character; the new count gives identical results (checked on 200,000 random inputs) about 11x faster on large files.
4. No debug chatter. Every call used to push two to four [FEEDBACK DEBUG] log notifications to the client.
5. Fewer round trips. For an agent, each tool call costs a full round trip, often far more than the command itself. Kilnshell adds:
   • batch: several tool calls (commands, reads, edits, searches) in one request, results numbered in order;
   • read_process_output with wait_for_exit: true: waits for the process to end and returns all its output at once, instead of polling;
   • start_search with wait: true: returns every result in one call, instead of start_search then get_more_search_results;
   • wait_for: waits unti

... View full README on GitHub