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how - Natural Language to Shell Commands

A CLI tool that turns plain English into shell commands, powered by LLMs running locally with Ollama

· 2 min read · by Samuel Wibrow
go cli ai ollama llm

You know what you want to do in the terminal, but can’t remember the exact flags. Was it find -mtime or find -mmin? Does tar need -xvf or -xzf? You Google it, wade through Stack Overflow circa 2012, and eventually find the answer buried under AI-generated SEO spam — three blog posts deep into “Best 10 ways to find files in Linux 2024 (Updated!)”.

So I wrote a small Go binary that asks an LLM what I meant and gets out of the way. how turns plain English into shell commands.

$ how find all go files modified in the last 24 hours

  find . -name '*.go' -mtime -1

  Finds all files ending in .go that were modified within the last day.

No fluff. No ads. No cookie banners. Just the command and a short explanation.

Running it locally with Ollama

The tool supports Anthropic, OpenAI, and Ollama as backends. I use Ollama for local inference - no API keys, no network calls, no usage costs. Just a model running on my machine. Everything stays private and it works offline, which is handy on a plane or in an environment where you’d rather not send queries to external APIs.

Setup

Install with Go or grab a binary from the releases page:

go install github.com/swibrow/how@latest

Then initialise the config:

how config init

This creates ~/.config/how/config.yaml. Point it at Ollama:

provider: ollama
ollama:
  model: llama3
  url: http://localhost:11434

That’s it. No API key required - just make sure Ollama is running.

Usage

Basic query:

how reverse a string in bash

Auto-execute the returned command with -y:

how -y list listening ports

Pipe directly into your shell with -q (quiet mode):

how -q convert png to jpg with imagemagick | sh

Examples

$ how compress this folder into a tar.gz called backup.tar.gz
  tar -czvf backup.tar.gz .
  Creates a gzipped tarball of the current directory.

$ how show me the 10 largest files in this directory
  du -ah . | sort -rh | head -n 10
  Lists files by size, largest first, top 10.

$ how kill the process listening on port 8080
  lsof -ti:8080 | xargs kill -9
  Finds and kills the process bound to port 8080.

$ how rename all .jpeg files to .jpg in this folder
  for f in *.jpeg; do mv -- "$f" "${f%.jpeg}.jpg"; done
  Renames every .jpeg file in the current directory to .jpg.

The code is on GitHub: github.com/swibrow/how — MIT licensed, written in Go, contributions welcome.