command line tool written in Go to use Gemini for help with command syntax
Based on the please.bash project from Peter Marreck I asked Gemini to write a Go executable program to get assistance on commands for Zshell. It reads the previous ten commands from the .zsh_history file but we can modify the program later using the HISTFILE environment variable.
This is my attempt to replace some of the functionality of the Warp terminal emulator, which does a very fine job of getting me out of syntax frustration, but it's a massive memory hog. It's also not yet (Dec 2024) available on Windows and I very much enjoy using my GPUs on my gaming pc for running local models. I'd like to be able to use this both on my MacBook and on my Win11 rig running Ubuntu via WSL.
The tool will ask Gemini to present three suggestions for commands to the user, who can use the Tab key to cycle through the suggestions, Enter to accept and run a suggestion, or Escape key to reject all and return to the command line.
First off, we need to install Go if you don't already have it. I ran into trouble with apt because it has version 1.19 of golang and not the later version that the Gemini SDK needs. So after trying to do it manually (really confusing on WSL) I used snap instead, which installed the latest-and-greatest version, 1.23.4 as of December 29, 2024.
sudo snap install go --classic
Really have no idea what the --classic flag is for, I think it has something to do with where it's installed. Notably, it didn't use a current symlink, it just created a folder /snap/go/10748/bin and put everything there. Not sure if it'll update properly with further versions, but right now that's a problem for future me. Let's verify that we did it right with go version and see where our errors are.
Once we have go installed we can use it to install its own tools and such. It also has a system for maintaining a list of dependencies go.mod and a sort of version control go.sum, which is interesting. So let's install our tools
go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports@latest
Make a directory for the project, I just called it Please
mkdir please && cd please
The initialize a new Go module to create a go.mod file which will track the project's dependencies.
go mod init please
Now for our first dependency, the Google AI Go SDK. T his will add the necessary packages to the go.mod and go.sum files.
go get github.com/google/generative-ai-go
To handle the Tab / Enter / Escape functionality, we'll need a third-party library.
go get github.com/eiannone/keyboard
This should be all set from a Step 0 perspective. Your box is all ready to go to do some development and write and compile (aka build) executable programs.
Now for the specifics. We'll need to get an API key from Google. Go (here)[https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey] and fetch one and be sure to edit your go.main file to include this. You can also change the history look-back to be any number of commands in the /zsh_history using the n variable in line 65 of the main.go file.
Once that's all set up, let's download the file and go build the program. Note that the default is to name the executable with the name of the project folder. Here, I'm calling it please so that's what it'll build it as. You can change this by specifying something else using the -o flag for the command, like this: go build -o new_name.
To run the program, use ./ please <your request>