butterfish-shell
Butterfish Shell is an AI-powered command line shell wrapper that integrates OpenAI's GPT models to provide contextual command suggestions, debugging help, and goal-oriented automation directly within bash or zsh shells on MacOS and Linux.
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What it does
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butterfish-shell
Butterfish Shell is designed for command line users who want to enhance their shell experience with AI assistance. It wraps existing shells like bash and zsh, enabling users to start commands with a capital letter to prompt AI-powered suggestions, explanations, and debugging help using OpenAI's GPT models. The AI has access to the shell history, allowing contextual conversations such as understanding why a command failed or generating new commands. It also supports a Goal Mode where the AI acts as an agent to execute commands to achieve user-defined goals. Butterfish is open source, configurable, and aims to be unobtrusive while improving productivity for developers and command line users.
AI-powered command-line tool for shell prompting and autocompletion.
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Claim this listingKey Features
AI-Powered Command Prompting
Start commands with a capital letter to send prompts to OpenAI's GPT models, receiving contextual help and command generation based on shell history.
Goal Mode
An agent mode where the AI suggests and optionally executes commands to accomplish user goals, with options for safe or unsafe execution.
Autosuggest
GitHub Copilot-like autosuggestions for shell commands based on recent history and AI-generated completions, applied with the Tab key.
Customizable Prompts
Users can edit the prompt wrappers in a YAML configuration file to control the instructions sent to the AI.
Multi-Model Support
Supports different OpenAI models like gpt-4-turbo and gpt-3.5-turbo, and can connect to any OpenAI-compatible API endpoint.
Shell Integration
Works seamlessly with bash and zsh on MacOS and Linux, intercepting shell input/output without interfering with normal workflows.
Verbose Logging and Transparency
Enables verbose mode to log full AI prompts and responses for transparency and debugging.
Neovim Plugin
Includes butterfish.nvim plugin for fluent LLM prompting within Neovim.
Pricing
Butterfish itself is open source and free to use, but requires an OpenAI API key which may incur costs depending on your OpenAI subscription and usage.
Use Cases
Contextual Command Debugging
Ask why a previous shell command failed and get AI explanations and fixes without leaving the terminal.
Command Generation
Request AI to generate shell commands for specific tasks, such as finding files or installing dependencies.
Goal-Oriented Automation
Use Goal Mode to have the AI suggest and execute sequences of commands to accomplish complex tasks.
Shell Autocompletion
Receive AI-powered autosuggestions for commands as you type, improving efficiency and reducing errors.
General ChatGPT Interface
Use the shell as a ChatGPT interface for non-shell related queries, like asking for recipes.
Neovim Code Rewriting
Use the butterfish.nvim plugin to prompt LLMs for code rewriting and other programming tasks inside Neovim.
Integrations
OpenAI API
Uses OpenAI's ChatGPT API for AI-powered command suggestions and interactions.
OpenAI-Compatible APIs
Supports any server with an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint, enabling use with local or alternative AI models.
Neovim
Provides a Neovim plugin (butterfish.nvim) for LLM prompting inside the editor.
Benefits
Limitations
Frequently Asked Questions
What shells does Butterfish support?
How do I prompt the AI in Butterfish Shell?
What is Goal Mode?
Is Butterfish free to use?
Can I customize the AI prompts?
Does Butterfish interfere with normal shell usage?
Getting Started
- 1 Install Butterfish Shell via Homebrew on MacOS or using 'go install' on MacOS/Linux.
- 2 Run 'butterfish shell' to start the shell wrapper.
- 3 On first run, provide your OpenAI API key when prompted.
- 4 Optionally alias 'butterfish' to a shorter command like 'bf' in your shell config.
- 5 Start using AI prompts by typing commands starting with a capital letter.
- 6 Explore Goal Mode by starting commands with '!' or '!!' for agent-driven automation.
Support
docs
Documentation and usage instructions are available on the GitHub repository.
issue tracker
Users can submit issues and feature requests via the GitHub repository at https://github.com/bakks/butterfish.
API
Butterfish uses the OpenAI ChatGPT API and supports any OpenAI-compatible API endpoint configurable via the --base-url flag.
Butterfish respects OpenAI API token limits (e.g., 4096 tokens for GPT-3.5) and truncates shell history accordingly to fit requests.
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