Simon Willison's Weblog: zsh

How to add a directory to your PATH

2025-02-14T02:40:11+00:00

Classic Julia Evans piece here, answering a question which you might assume is obvious but very much isn't.

Plenty of useful tips in here, plus the best explanation I've ever seen of the three different Bash configuration options:

Bash has three possible config files: ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, and ~/.profile.

If you're not sure which one your system is set up to use, I'd recommend testing this way:

add echo hi there to your ~/.bashrc

Restart your terminal

If you see "hi there", that means ~/.bashrc is being used! Hooray!

Otherwise remove it and try the same thing with ~/.bash_profile

You can also try ~/.profile if the first two options don't work.

This article also reminded me to try which -a again, which gave me this confusing result for datasette:

% which -a datasette
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniconda/base/bin/datasette
/Users/simon/.local/bin/datasette
/Users/simon/.local/bin/datasette

Why is the second path in there twice? I figured out how to use rg to search just the dot-files in my home directory:

rg local/bin -g '/.*' --max-depth 1

And found that I have both a .zshrc and .zprofile file that are adding that to my path:

.zshrc.backup
4:export PATH="$PATH:/Users/simon/.local/bin"

.zprofile
5:export PATH="$PATH:/Users/simon/.local/bin"

.zshrc
7:export PATH="$PATH:/Users/simon/.local/bin"

Tags: bash, julia-evans, ripgrep, zsh

q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM

2024-12-19T15:42:34+00:00

q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM

Spotted these in David Gasquez's zshrc dotfiles: two shell functions that use my LLM tool to answer questions about a website or YouTube video.

Here's how to ask a question of a website:

q https://simonwillison.net/ 'What has Simon written about recently?'

I got back:

Recently, Simon Willison has written about various topics including:

Building Python Tools - Exploring one-shot applications using Claude and dependency management with uv.

Modern Java Usage - Discussing recent developments in Java that simplify coding.

GitHub Copilot Updates - New free tier and features in GitHub Copilot for Vue and VS Code.

AI Engagement on Bluesky - Investigating the use of bots to create artificially polite disagreements.

OpenAI WebRTC Audio - Demonstrating a new API for real-time audio conversation with models.

It works by constructing a Jina Reader URL to convert that URL to Markdown, then piping that content into LLM along with the question.

The YouTube one is even more fun:

qv 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRuLgar5XZw' 'what does Simon say about open source?'

It said (about this 72 minute video):

Simon emphasizes that open source has significantly increased productivity in software development. He points out that before open source, developers often had to recreate existing solutions or purchase proprietary software, which often limited customization. The availability of open source projects has made it easier to find and utilize existing code, which he believes is one of the primary reasons for more efficient software development today.

The secret sauce behind that one is the way it uses yt-dlp to extract just the subtitles for the video:

local subtitle_url=$(yt-dlp -q --skip-download --convert-subs srt --write-sub --sub-langs "en" --write-auto-sub --print "requested_subtitles.en.url" "$url")
local content=$(curl -s "$subtitle_url" | sed '/^$/d' | grep -v '^[0-9]*$' | grep -v '\-->' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr '\n' ' ')

That first line retrieves a URL to the subtitles in WEBVTT format - I saved a copy of that here. The second line then uses curl to fetch them, then sed and grep to remove the timestamp information, producing this.

Via Useful LLM tools (2024 Edition)

Tags: youtube, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, zsh, jina

Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool

2024-04-10T23:17:59+00:00

Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool

Martin Heinz drops a wealth of knowledge about ways to configure zsh (the default shell on macOS these days) to get better utility from your shell history.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: productivity, shell, zsh

llmc.sh

2024-02-16T18:19:41+00:00

llmc.sh

Adam Montgomery wrote this a neat wrapper around my LLM CLI utility: it adds a “llmc” zsh function which you can ask for shell commands (llmc ’use ripgrep to find files matching otter’) which outputs the command, an explanation of the command and then copies the command to your clipboard for you to paste and execute if it looks like the right thing.

Via @montasaurus_rex

Tags: cli, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, zsh

direnv

2017-11-05T19:59:35+00:00

direnv

A shell extension (for bash, zsh and others) which can automatically set and unset environment variables when you cd into specific directories. Useful for managing things like a project’s GOPATH or automatically activating Python virtual environments.

Via Go at DigitalOcean

Tags: bash, shell, zsh