Chatblade

A CLI Swiss Army Knife for ChatGPT

Chatblade is a versatile command-line interface (CLI) tool designed to interact with OpenAI's ChatGPT. It accepts piped input, arguments, or both, and allows you to save common prompt preambles for quick usage. Additionally, Chatblade provides utility methods to extract JSON or Markdown from ChatGPT responses.

Note: You'll need to set up your OpenAI API key to use Chatblade.

You can do that by either passing --openai-api-key KEY or by setting an env variable OPENAI_API_KEY (recommended). The examples below all assume an env variable is set.

Install

Latest and greatest

Things are still being added actively, so to stay up to date with the current main branch you can:

• check out the project, and run pip install .
• or pip install 'chatblade @ git+https://github.com/npiv/chatblade'

Via pypi

The last released version can be installed with pip install chatblade

via Brew tap (slow...)

Offical Homebrew acceptance is pending, in the meantime you can use this brew tap:

brew tap npiv/chatblade
brew install chatblade

Some Examples

Basic

In its simplest form, Chatblade can perform a straightforward query:

chatblade how can I extract a still frame from a video at 22:01 with ffmpeg

Continue a conversation and extract

To continue the conversation and ask for a change, you can use the -l flag for "last."

chatblade -l can we make a gif instead from 00:22:01 to 00:22:04

You can also use -l without a query to redisplay the last thread at any point.

If you want to extract the last suggested command, you can use the -e flag. For example:

chatblade -e | pbcopy

This command places the ffmpeg suggestion in your clipboard on macOS.

Piping into Chatblade

You can pipe input to Chatblade:

curl https://news.ycombinator.com/rss | chatblade given the above rss can you show me the top 3 articles about AI and their links -c 4

The piped input is placed above the query and sent to ChatGPT. In this example, we also use the -c 4 flag to select ChatGPT-4 (the default is ChatGPT-3.5).

Check token count and estimated costs

If you want to check the approximate cost and token usage of a previous query, you can use the -t flag for "tokens."

curl https://news.ycombinator.com/rss | chatblade given the above rss can you show me the top 3 articles about AI and their links -t

This won't perform any action over the wire, and just calculates the tokens locally.

Make custom prompts

We can also save common prompt configs for easy reuse. Any yaml file we place under ~/.config/chatblade/ will be picked up by the command.

So for example, given the following yaml called etymology.yaml, which contains:

system: |-
  I want you to act as a professional Etymologist and Quiz Generator. You have a deep knowledge of etymology and will be provided with a word. 
  The goal is to create cards that quiz on both the etymology and finding the word by its definition.

  The following is what a perfect answer would look like for the word "disparage":

  [{
    "question": "A verb used to indicate the act of speaking about someone or something in a negative or belittling way.<br/> <i>E.g He would often _______ his coworkers behind their backs.</i>",
    "answer": "disparage"
  },
  {
    "question": "What is the etymological root of the word disparage?",
    "answer": "From the Old French word <i>'desparagier'</i>, meaning 'marry someone of unequal rank', which comes from <i>'des-'</i> (dis-) and <i>'parage'</i> (equal rank)"
  }]

  You will return answers in JSON only. Answer truthfully and if you don't know then say so. Keep questions as close as possible to the
  provided examples. Make sure to include an example in the definition question. Use HTML within the strings to nicely format your answers.

  If multiple words are provided, create questions and answers for each of them in one list. 
  
  Only answer in JSON, don't provide any more text. Valid JSON uses "" quotes to wrap its items.

We can now run a command and refer to this prompt with -p etymology:

chatblade -p etymology gregarious

And since we asked for JSON, we can pipe our result to something else, e.g.:

chatblade -l -e > toanki

Help

usage: Chatblade [-h] [-l] [-p PROMPT] [--openai-api-key KEY] [--temperature T] [-c {3.5,4}] [-i] [-e] [-r] [-t] [query ...]

a CLI Swiss Army Knife for ChatGPT

positional arguments:
  query                 Query to send to chat GPT

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l, --last            display the last result. If a query is given the conversation is continued
  -p PROMPT, --prompt-config PROMPT
                        prompt config name, or file containing a prompt config
  --openai-api-key KEY  the OpenAI API key can also be set as env variable OPENAI_API_KEY
  --temperature T       temperature (openai setting)
  -c {3.5,4}, --chat-gpt {3.5,4}
                        chat GPT model
  -i, --interactive     start an interactive chat session. This will implicitly continue the conversation
  -e, --extract         extract content from response if possible (either json or code block)
  -r, --raw             print the last response as pure text, don't pretty print or format
  -t, --tokens          display what *would* be sent, how many tokens, and estimated costs