lex the hacker

I prefer to be called a hacker.

Describe what you want in plain English, and lex writes the shell command for you.

$ lex "search the dir for 'xyz'"

$ grep -rn 'xyz' .

While lex thinks, you get a spinner. Then it shows the command with a short explanation of how it works, and offers it to you — pick it (just press Enter) to copy it to your clipboard:

╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ grep -rn 'xyz' .                                 │
│                                                  │
│ Searches every file under the current directory  │
│ for the text "xyz", printing each match with its │
│ file name and line number.                       │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
? copy to clipboard? (Use arrow keys)
 » grep -rn 'xyz' .
   skip

✓ copied to clipboard

Either way, the command also lands on your command line, ready to run.

It never executes anything itself. You always read the command and press Enter (or edit it, or throw it away). Nothing runs without you.

On typing. Putting text on your prompt uses the TIOCSTI ioctl, which current Linux kernels disable by default (dev.tty.legacy_tiocsti = 0) because it was a privilege-escalation vector. When it's unavailable — a hardened kernel, no terminal, a pipe — or when the command spans more than one line, the command simply doesn't land on your prompt. That's a normal outcome, not an error: it's still right there in the panel, and on your clipboard. Either way, lex never presses Enter for you.

Install

pip install lex-the-hacker

This gives you the lex-the-hacker command. lex is a common command name (the lexical analyzer generator has had it since the 70s), so lex doesn't claim it — but nothing stops you:

alias lex='lex-the-hacker'

The examples in this README assume that alias.

Configuration

lex talks to any OpenAI-compatible chat API — hosted OpenAI, or a local Ollama server. Point it at one with three environment variables:

Hosted OpenAI:

export LEX_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini
export LEX_API_KEY=sk-...

A local Ollama server:

export LEX_MODEL=llama3.1
export LEX_API_KEY=ollama
export LEX_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1

lex also tells the model which shell you're in, so the command it writes matches your shell's syntax. Run lex shell to see what it detected.

Clipboard on Linux. Copying first tries your system clipboard via pyperclip, which on Linux needs one of xclip, xsel, or wl-clipboard installed. Without one, lex falls back to OSC 52 — asking your terminal itself to set the clipboard, no install needed — which modern terminals (VS Code, kitty, alacritty, WezTerm, iTerm2, foot, …) support, even over SSH. If neither route works, the copy is skipped quietly.

Usage

Call lex with a description of what you want to do, in quotes:

$ lex "find every python file changed in the last week"

lex puts its best guess on your prompt:

$ find . -name '*.py' -mtime -7

From there it's your command like any other — run it, tweak it, or clear the line and try a different description.

More examples:

$ lex "undo my last git commit but keep the changes"
$ git reset --soft HEAD~1

$ lex "compress this folder into a tar.gz"
$ tar -czf folder.tar.gz folder/

$ lex "show what's listening on port 8080"
$ lsof -i :8080

Aliases and scripts

lex alias <name> <description> gives you the command and a one-liner that writes the alias to your shell's config file — ~/.zshrc for zsh, ~/.bashrc for bash, and so on — so it survives beyond the current session:

$ lex alias ll "list files recursively, long format"
$ echo "alias ll='ls -laR'" >> ~/.zshrc

(New shells pick it up automatically; source ~/.zshrc brings it into the current one. If lex doesn't know your shell's config file, it offers the bare alias definition instead.)

lex script <name> <description> gives you the command and a one-liner that writes it to an executable script, with the extension and shebang for your shell:

$ lex script convert "convert every png in this folder to jpg"
$ cat > convert.sh <<'LEX_EOF'
#!/bin/bash
for f in *.png; do magick "$f" "${f%.png}.jpg"; done
LEX_EOF
chmod +x convert.sh

The alias or script command is the one you're offered to copy — the panel shows the underlying command above it, so you can see what you're about to wrap. The script one spans several lines, which is the "more than one line" case in the note on typing above: it goes to your clipboard rather than your prompt.

As always, lex only writes the command — it doesn't touch your config file or create the script itself. Nothing changes until you run it (lex shell shows which shell and config file it detected).

Why you're always safe

lex only ever writes a command to your shell. It doesn't run it, and it can't run it — executing is up to you. So if a suggestion looks wrong, you'll see it before anything happens.