eve0415/cella

cella

Latin: "small room, chamber"

A terminal-native devcontainer CLI. Built for agents.

[!WARNING] cella is in early development. Core commands work, but expect breaking changes.

Why

The spec is great. The tooling isn't. The Dev Container specification (spec) has become a de facto standard — adopted by VS Code, JetBrains, GitHub Codespaces, CodeSandbox, and others. But the spec defines features like forwardPorts and portsAttributes that the reference CLI simply doesn't implement. SSH agent forwarding, credential forwarding, port forwarding, and BROWSER interception all require the VS Code Dev Containers extension (which runs vscode-server inside the container) to work. The CLI is a CI build tool, not a general-purpose devcontainer runtime.

Agents are the first developers now. AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI — are terminal-based. They're the primary developers on many projects today. Dev containers should integrate with the terminal, not require a GUI editor. Use your own tools — Ghostty, WezTerm, Windows Terminal, tmux, Neovim — or just let the agent work headless.

VS Code is becoming Copilot-first. Every update pushes Copilot deeper — the sidebar opens on every new directory, features compete for attention with AI integrations. If you're not using Copilot, you're paying the overhead anyway. Dev containers shouldn't require VS Code for basic fu