vichat

vichat

A simple LLM chat cli (with Vim).

Why

I find it easier to use text files to test different system prompts on the same user input than a Web UI.

Installation

go install github.com/JackKCWong/vichat@latest

# install vim plugin
vichat i 

Usage

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your LLM api key>
export OPENAI_API_BASE=<your LLM api base>

Chat directly on cli and open the respone in Vim:

vichat chat [options] tell me a joke about Go

# e.g. 
vichat tell me a joke about Vim

# or output to terminal directly
vichat -r tell me a joke about emacs

Chat with history:

cat <<_EOF | vichat chat
SYSTEM: You are a professional joke writer

USER: tell me a joke about goose

AI: Why did the goose go to the doctor? Because he was feeling a little down!

USER: Why did it feel down?
_EOF

Or chat with history in Vim:

cat <<_EOF > test.chat
SYSTEM: You are a professional joke writer

USER: tell me a joke about goose
_EOF

vim test.chat

ctrl+s

When in Vim:

• ctrl+s (n or i mode) to send the full chat, the result will be appended to the end of the current buffer, just like a usual chat experience.

• ctrl+t (n or i mode) to send the full chat, but the result will be put to a new buffer, useful when you want to ask many simple questions that doesn't require context. Saves token usages.

• ctrl+a (n mode) to jump to the end and start asking a new question.

• ctrl+t (n mode) to estimate the number of tokens using titoken gpt-like encoding.

• ctrl+k (n or v mode) to count the number of tokens.

• ctrl+c (n or v mode) to chunk the text using RecursiveTextSplitter.

• ctrl+n (n mode) to start a new chat with the same system prompt.

• q (n mode) close current chat.

• ctrl+q (n mode) force close current chat.

Vim tips:

• put this line in your ~/.vimrc to enable code block highlight in markdown

syntax on
let g:markdown_fenced_languages = ['html', 'js=javascript', 'rust', 'go', 'java']