User Guide

Below is a guide to help you get the most out of Whisper.

Setup / Config

The first thing you should do is setup your config by running

❯whisper config init

This will create a whisper.toml file in the ~/.whisper directory. You can then edit this file to set the API keys for the different LLM providers you want to use.

Edit A Config Value

You can always edit the whisper.toml file directly to change your config. But you can also use the whisper config set command to change the config. For example, to change the API key for the OpenAI provider, you can run:

❯ whisper config set openai.api_key YOUR_API_KEY

Or, if you have your key stored in an environment variable, you can run:

❯whisper config set openai.api_key $YOUR_API_KEY

Read A Config Value

You can read a config value by running whisper config get <key>. For example, to read the API key for the OpenAI provider, you can run:

❯ whisper config get openai.api_key

Show All Config Values

You can show all the config values by running whisper config show.

List all available code themes

You can list all the available code themes by running whisper config themes.

Local Models With GPT4All

Whisper supports using local models via GPT4All. To use a local model, you can set the local_path and local_model for the gpt4all provider in the whisper.toml file. For example:

[gpt4all]
local_path = "~/.local/share/nomic.ai/GPT4All"
local_model = "Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct.Q4_0.gguf"

If you're unfamiliar with GPT4All, you can learn more here.

Asking Questions

Asking your LLM questions is easy! After you've setup your whisper config, you can start asking questions by running whisper ask "<your question>".

Or even simpler, the CLI defaults to the ask sub-command, so you can simply run whisper "<your question>" as a convenience.

❯ whisper "What is the capital of france?"
╭────────────────────────────── Capital of France ───────────────────────────────╮
│ The capital of France is Paris.                                                │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Using A Different Provider

❯ whisper "What is the capital of france?" -p anthropic

You're config file defaults to using the OpenAI provider. But you can change that with the -p/--provider option. For example, to use the Anthropic provider, you can run:

You can also change the default provider in the whisper.toml file, or by running:

❯ whisper config set default.provider "anthropic"

Using A Different Model

❯ whisper "What is the capital of france?" -m gpt-3.5-turbo

You can easily change the model using the -m/--model option.

Asking Code Related Questions

❯ whisper "How do I sort a list in python?"

Displaying beautiful code snippets in your terminal is one of the core features of Whisper...

Using A Different Code Theme

❯ whisper \
    "What's that terminal command to close a process that is using port 8080?" \
    -t coffee \

The default theme is solarized-dark. But you can change that at runtime with the -t/--theme option. For example, to use the github theme, you can run:

If you want to permanently change the theme, you can edit the theme option in the whisper.toml file.

whisper config set default.theme "coffee"

Copy A Snippet

❯ whisper "What's that terminal command to close a process that is using port 8080?" --copy

You can copy a snippet to your clipboard using the --copy option. For example:

You can also change the default behavior of whether or not to copy a snippet by setting the copy_snippet option in the whisper.toml file, or by running:

❯ whisper config set default.copy_snippet true

Using The System Prompt

You can use the -s/--system option to change the system prompt.

whisper -s "You are a data scientist" "How do I instantiate a linear regression model in python?"

Piping (|) Context To The Model

❯ cat my_script.py | whisper -s "What is happening in this code?"

Sometimes you might want to interrogate a file or content from the web. You can do this by piping the content to the model. For example: