Fix macos terminal issues and teach ssage it name

[PiotrCzapla]

tldr

• ssage does not know that its cli is called like this so It does not recognized it self in the tmux history
• zsh -ic alias outputs useless messages and consume additional tokens
• zsh -i opens /dev/tty which may crash whole proces group, try cat |ssage oops

ssage - a typo

We should add ssage to the prompt so that shell sage is confused when it sees ssage invoications.
Righ now:

$ ssage 'What will this do: "ssage tar"'
About to ripgrep a search term with the following arguments:
{'argstr': 'ssage'}
Execute this? (y/n/suggestion): n
Based on the context, "ssage tar" appears to be a typo or partial command. Here are the likely possibilities:                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                    Most Probable Interpretations:                                                                                                                                           
 1 Typo for "sage tar" - If sage is installed (SageMath), this would pass "tar" as an argument                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
 2 Typo for "usage tar" - Intended to check tar usage/help                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
 3 Partial shell history search -

After adding (ssage):

$ ssage 'What will this do: "ssage tar"'
The command ssage tar will invoke me (ShellSage/ssage) with the argument "tar".   

zsh session / macos messages

The zsh in macos likes to output additional information in interactive mode. Like:

• saving restoring session - used when terminal is being restored after restart.
• OSC 7 - info to terminal app about current directory (the bit starting with ' \x1b]7;')

This behavior can be disable by removing TERM_PROGRAM from the environment, so the zsh doesn't assumes it runs
under a terminal emulator app.

>>> print(co(["zsh", "-ic", "echo;echo hello", ],text=True))
Saving session...completed.
Restored session: Fri Oct 31 17:22:21 CET 2025
�]7;file://Piotrs-MacBook-Pro-3.local/Users/pczapla/Work/shell_sage/nbs
hello

removing TERM_PROGRAM makes the output clean again

>>> env = os.environ.copy()
>>> env.pop('TERM_PROGRAM',None)
>>> print(co(["zsh", "-ic", "echo test", ],text=True, env=env))
test

zsh -i uses /dev/tty

There is one more issue. The _aliases tries to access the /dev/tty (zsh -i). This crashes chains like cat|ssage hi. Even worse it takes down the whole process group and terminal vanish. Only apple terminal lets me catch what is really going on:

$ cat|ssage hi
zsh: error on TTY read: Input/output error

Saving session...completed.

[Process completed]

I couldn't reproduce the problem in Jupyter, so I created a few examples in the debug folder.
To see the issue in action, run cat | python debug/aliases.py in Apple Terminal -- it will crash the same way ssage does now.
The fixed version safe_aliases.py, starts a new session / process group which removes access to /dev/tty. I also closed the stdin and stderr for good measure.
You can verify that the fix works with: cat | python debug/safe_aliases.py.

[gitnotebooks]

Found 1 changed notebook. Review the changes at https://app.gitnotebooks.com/AnswerDotAI/shell_sage/pull/57

[ncoop57]

Great PR @PiotrCzapla , really appreciate you figuring out all this stuff. Made me learn more about interesting terminal and shell quirks!