samuel@wibrow.net ~ $ _

how - Natural Language to Shell Commands

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

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.

how fixes that. It’s a Go CLI that 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

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