Tools for low-vision coders

Shell Chat

A wrapper for your shell that lets you talk to ChatGPT about the recent interactions.

1. Wraps bash or another shell you pass in, so that it behaves exactly like what you'd expect.
2. Except that when you run the chat command, it switches into a separate mode where you're talking to ChatGPT about the past 3k (configurable) characters of interaction.
3. You have a back and forth conversation, and all of ChatGPT's responses are read aloud.
4. You can Ctrl-C to interrupt and go back to the chat prompt.
5. You type exit to go back to your shell.

Installation

From the Python environment that will be activated when your chosen shell starts, run

pip install lowvision

Then set your OpenAI API key

export OPENAI_API_KEY='whatever'

NOTE: The reason for installing in the Python environment active when your shell starts is because a chat command is installed by lowvision that activates chat mode, and it must be available inside your wrapped shell. if you've installed in a virtualenv instead, you'll need to activate that virtualenv after running the shell wrapper, or chat won't properly activate chat mode.

Usage

See the help with

python -m lowvision.shell -h

Without arguments, it will

• launch Bash
• with a 3000 character scrollback buffer
• use espeak for text-to-speech
• and gpt-3.5-turbo as the ChatGPT model

Here's an example that changes those defaults:

python -m lowvision.shell --shell /bin/sh \
                          --scrollback 5000 \
                          --tts 'say -v Daniel --rate 220' \
                          --model gpt-4
                          
sh-3.2$ ping -c 3 google.com
PING google.com (142.251.163.100): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 142.251.163.100: icmp_seq=0 ttl=106 time=18.316 ms
^C
--- google.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 18.316/18.316/18.316/0.000 ms
sh-3.2$ chat     
?> what happened?
The user performed a ping test to google.com by sending 3 packets, and received a reply from one packet. The response shows the IP address of google.com and the round-trip time for the packet. The test was interrupted with ^C after receiving one response.
?> exit
sh-3.2$

Installing as the default shell

If you want to use this as your default shell, you could create a script like this (replacing the path to the Python environment where you installed lowvision) and then set your default shell to that script.

#!/bin/sh

export OPENAI_API_KEY="whatever"
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/mambaforge/base/bin/python3 -m lowvision.shell

Then make it executable, and set it as your default shell with chsh -s /path/to/your/script.sh.