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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people are angry or don't understand the feature. Am I the only one who actually loves this feature? I'd say 50% of my interactions with GPT are "Make a command line to do X". Right now I have to copy/paste back and forth to the GPT and tell it what happened.

Having all of that built into the terminal is fantastic! The only feature I would ask for is obfuscation -- when I'm doing it for work, I am always careful that I change my question such that I get the right answer without revealing any company information.

Of course a solution to this is enabling someone to point at another model that they control, either locally or hosted privately.

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Why does the emulator have to do this? Can’t it be a plug-in for bash/zsh/whatnot? Those already support tab completion. It could even be a cli:

prompt “command that you want it to generate”. Then inspect it and run it. If you are feeling very lucky type “$(prompt “command you want to run”)” and poof it executes. Why does this need to be in one of the most privileged apps on my machine?

It certainly could be built into the shell. But the people who did it first make a terminal. No reason it couldn't be ported to the shell though.

> Why does the emulator have to do this? Can’t it be a plug-in for bash/zsh/whatnot?

I've no interest in using it because I'm a cheap bastard and am not going to pay $20/month for a key, but if I were going to use it I'd want it in the terminal emulator. If it were a shell plugin I'd have to install it in my shell on my Mac, the shells on my two Raspberry Pis, the shell on my Amazon Lightsail instance, and the shells on the half-dozen or so servers at work that I regularly ssh to from home. Oh, and also the shells in the Linux VMs I run my work test environment in.

API keys are unrelated to the $20/month product, and the keys are pay-as-you-go. The newest model is $15 per million tokens of output, which is to say, you would be extremely hard-pressed to spend $20/month on the API.

Why can it not be a plugin for the terminal emulator?

I understand why people don't like that "integrates with third party LLM services" was just added as a core feature to their terminal emulator(which are typically very minimal applications when it comes to business logic).

I can also see the usefulness of having it in the terminal emulator, but I think most people's reaction comes from the confusion of it being included in the core code instead of an extra module you download.

This whole things feels like if vim added a copilot integration into the core app. It make a lot more sense as an additional download than core functionality.

simonw's llm tool does this with a plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd

I'm with the others that want it in a command, not embedded in my terminal

Isn't it much much better suited to be an editor integration you can use inside of fc?

> change my question such that I get the right answer without revealing any company information.

Well goodbye to that part.

Hence my request for obfuscation or using a privately hosted model. :)

Probably on the backlog. Mozilla had one today waiting 25 years, haha.

You can use a privately hosted model with iTerm2, just change the API endpoint in advanced settings to any of the myriad of local LLMs that are OpenAI compatible (like ollama or LMStudio).

Would you like iterm to provide Google search results? Should iterm have discord chats or irc channels in it?

It's not what I want iterm to do, I want iterm to be a great terminal.

And that it still is, with a new lightweight feature that needn’t bother anyone unless they wish to enable it.

Don't assign an api key to it then?

if google results were as effective at generating exactly the command i want, yeah i'd want them to include it as an optional feature

If there were a way for me to type a question and get just the command line back by searching on Google, yeah, I'd like that too. But that's not how Google works. ChatGPT can give me exactly what I want.

That's also not how chatgpt works...

And if it were, what's stopping the same filters to be added to google to convert the LLM output(or the google search results) into just the command to execute?

That's exactly how it works, as you can see from the demo video in the post. Because you can tell it to output like that.

And sure, Google could add that, but it doesn't have that today.

That's still not how chatgpt works.

That's how the plugin developed for iTerm2 works, but the actual result from chatgpt needs to be filtered by iTerm2 to get to the result in the demonstration.

What's stopping the same filtering from being used on a google search result instead of a response from an LLM API?

No, that's not how the plugin works. It sends context to ChatGPT telling it to return a single command that is copy/pasteable. The plugin does no filtering of the results. You can literally read the code for yourself:

https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/blob/master/sources/iTe...

No, but I might like iterm to have integrated support for various commands, shortcuts, aliases, etc. This is, IMHO, a very natural extension of that. I would prefer even less friction, as for any command I don't know by heart, asking ChatGPT in natural language is the most efficient way to get the commands and arguments I want, usually the very first time. Again IMHO, in the near term future, "great terminal" and "first class LLM support" will go hand in hand for most (but of course, not all) users.

Do you use tmux? If not are you appalled that iTerm2 has support for that? What about the other billion config/settings/features of iTerm2 that you choose not to use?

iTerm2 is a great terminal. It was great before the update and it’s still great after the update.

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