simonmysun/ell

A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash.

What it solves

ell provides a lightweight way to interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) directly from the command line. It eliminates the need for complex installations or heavy runtimes by being written in Bash, making it easy to integrate LLMs into terminal-based workflows and shell pipelines.

How it works

The tool acts as a wrapper that sends prompts to LLM APIs (such as OpenAI and Gemini) via curl. It supports several operational modes:

  • Standard Mode: Send a prompt as a command-line argument or read from a file/stdin.
  • Interactive Mode: Start a chat session within the terminal.
  • Record Mode: Captures terminal input and output to provide the LLM with the current session's context.
  • Templates & Plugins: Uses templates to handle function calling and provider-specific plugins, and allows external scripts (plugins) to extend its functionality.

Who it’s for

Developers, system administrators, and power users who spend most of their time in a Unix-like terminal and want a fast, pipe-friendly way to query LLMs without leaving their shell.

Highlights

  • Pure Bash: Extremely lightweight and easy to install on Unix-like systems.
  • Pipe-friendly: Designed to work seamlessly with other CLI tools using stdin.
  • Context Awareness: Can record terminal activity to help the LLM understand the current state of the system or specific errors.
  • Extensible: Supports custom backends, templates, and plugins to adapt to different LLM providers.

Related

  • Project
    chr15m/runprompt

    A command-line tool to execute .prompt files, allowing users to treat LLM prompts as versionable artifacts and automate AI workflows via the shell.

  • Project
    projectdiscovery/aix

    A command-line tool for interacting with OpenAI's LLM APIs, allowing users to query models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.0 directly from the terminal.

  • Dispatch
    Bash4LLM+ Overview: A Dependency-Free Bash Wrapper for LLM APIs

    Bash4LLM+ is a portable, single-script Bash wrapper designed for OpenAI-compatible APIs, specifically optimized for Groq, providing a secure and auditabile way to interact with LLMs from the command line.

  • Project
    simonw/llm

    A CLI tool and Python library for interacting with multiple LLMs, both via remote APIs and local installations, featuring built-in logging and structured data extraction.

  • Project
    tbckr/sgpt

    A Go-based command-line interface for interacting with OpenAI and other compatible LLMs to generate shell commands, code, and text responses directly in the terminal.