hey,

Run shell commands using natural language

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Table of Contents

• About
• Installation
• Setup
• Usage
  • hey, run
  • hey, explain
• Data sent to OpenAI
• More examples
• Contributing

About

Use natural language to run shell commands using GPT-3.

Just say what you want to do and hey, will generate the command for you.

Features

• use natural language to run shell commands
• explains files, scripts or any data scripts using GPT-3
• caches successful commands to speed up future runs

Why?

Shell scrips are powerful, but only if you know how to use them. hey, makes it easier to use shell scripts by using natural language.

Always forget the command to pack a directory into a tarball? Just say it:

hey, create a tarball with all files in the current directory, except javascript files

Install

hey, requires Node.js v16 or higher.

npm i -g hey-comma

Note

pnpm does not like the comma, so only the hey alias is available. You can add the alias manually if you want to: alias hey,=hey

Setup

OpenAI API key

hey, uses OpenAI's API to generate the commands. You need to sign up for an OpenAI account and create an API key.

Then, run:

hey, setup

and follow the instructions. This will create a .hey-comma folder in your home directory and store your API key there.

If you're not comfortable with saving your api key as plain text, you can also set your api key as environment variable and configure hey, to read it from there:

export YOUR_ENV_VAR_NAME=sk-...
hey, config set openai_api_key "env:YOUR_ENV_VAR_NAME"

Usage

hey, currently has two modes: run and explain. Most of the time you don't need to specify the mode specifically, as hey, will automatically detect the mode based on whether you pipe data to it or not.

hey, run

hey, run is the default mode. It will convert your instruction to a shell command and run it. It will always ask for confirmation before running the command.

hey, create a tarball with all files in the current dir, except js files

You can explicitly specify the mode:

hey, run: initialize a next.js project in ./my-app

(colon is optional)

hey, explain

hey, explain will explain the data you pipe to it.

Important

The piped data will be sent to OpenAI's servers, so you should only pipe data to hey, explain that you are comfortable sharing with OpenAI.

cat mysterious.sh | hey, is this safe to run

You can explicitly specify the mode:

cat script.sh | hey, explain: what does this do

(colon is optional)

Special characters

To pass special characters to the hey,, you can pass them as a quoted string:

hey, "what is the most recent file in ~/Documents?"

Configuration

You can configure hey, using the hey, config command. Or by editing the config.toml directly. To get the path to the config file, run:

hey, config path

For example, ~/.hey-comma/config.toml

Available options:

• openai_api_key: your OpenAI API key
• openai_model: the OpenAI model to use (e.g. gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4) (default: gpt-3.5-turbo)
• temperature: the temperature to use when generating commands (default: 0.2)
• max_tokens: the maximum number of tokens to generate (default: 256)
• run_prompt: the prompt to use when generating commands (see Custom prompts)
• explain_prompt: the prompt to use when explaining data (see Custom prompts)
• cache.max_entries: the maximum number of entries to cache (default: 50)

Use a different OpenAI model (e.g. GPT-4)

By default, hey, uses GPT-3 (gpt-). If you want to use another mode, like GPT-4, you can set the openai_model option:

hey, config set openai_model gpt-4

You can also use gpt-4 for a single command:

hey, "what is the most recent file in ~/Documents?" --gpt4

Note

Note that gpt-4 is significantly more expensive and quite a bit slower than gpt-3.

Custom prompts

You can customize the prompts used by hey, by setting the run_prompt and explain_prompt options. See prompts.ts for the default prompts.

Important

Make sure to add the placeholders (e.g. %INSTRUCTION%) to your custom prompts.

The following placeholders are available:

• %INSTRUCTION%: the instruction that is passed to hey, run or hey, explain
• %SHELL%: the current shell (e.g. bash or zsh) (only available for hey, run)
• %INPUT%: the data that is piped to hey, explain (only available for hey, explain)

Data sent to OpenAI

hey, will send the following data to OpenAI:

• The command you want to run
• The data you pipe to hey, explain
• Your current shell (e.g. bash or zsh)

More usage examples

hey, what are the largest files in my download directory

cat salaries.csv | hey, what is the average salary of people with a PhD

cat script.sh | hey, explain

Contributing

Development

This project uses bun as package manager & bundler.

If you don't have bun installed, run:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Install dependencies

bun install

Build

bun run build

Commit messages

This project uses semantic-release for automated release versions. So commits in this project follow the Conventional Commits guidelines. I recommend using commitizen for automated commit messages.