Natural Language Shell

The Natural Language Shell project uses language you naturally use to simplify and decomplicate the command line.

Whether you are a beginner and just getting started with the command line or familiar but forgot a specific command sequence, NLS only needs everyday English to understand what you want to do.

Installation

Requirements

• A Unix or Unix-like operating system is required (macOS, Linux, BSD)
• curl should be installed
• git is required (Download Git)
• The Go language is required (Download Go)
• Python 3 is optional but required for some features (Download Python 3)

Basic Installation

Run one of the following commands in your terminal to install NLS. You may need to enter your password.

Main branch (recommended):

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Saxfordshire/natural-language-shell/autoinstall.sh)"

Usage

Run NLS using the nls command. Type nls and your request on the same line after the command prompt.

[nls@computer ~]$ nls what time is it
nls: running: date "+%X"
14:30:14

[nls@computer ~]$ nls what is the size of file.txt
nls: running: ls -lah file.txt | awk '{print $5}'
4.2K

[nls@computer ~]$ nls show my version of git
nls: running: git --version
git version 2.29.2

NLS interprets your request and runs the appropriate shell commands.

Supported requests

NLS supports multiple ways of phrasing the same request

Date & Time

• What time is it
• What is today's date
• What month is it
• What day is it

Files

• What is the size of file.txt

Git

Prefix git to requests utilizing Git

• Show repository status
• Prepare file.txt for commit

Type your commit comment after the colon ":"

• Commit files with a comment: Updated React version
• Push commits to remote

Programs & Software

• What is my version of npm

Python 3 is required to run the local web server

• Start a testing server on port 8000

User

• What is my username
• What is my full name
• What is my IP address

Uninstalling

To uninstall NLS, simply run the following command and enter your password when prompted.

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/nls

License

The Natural Language Shell is released under the MIT License.

About

The Natural Language Shell project was originally created by Saxfordshire.

NLS is heavily inspired by the now-unmaintained Betty project.