thetaterm

Supercharge your terminal with AI: describe what you want, get a shell command that is correct for your system, confirm, run.

Why

You shouldn't have to remember whether it's tar -xzf or tar -zxvf, or which sed -i your Mac accepts. Say what you want in plain words and thetaterm writes the command for you. It's right for your system, because thetaterm checks whether your tools are GNU, BSD or BusyBox and shows the model the installed tool's man page. It runs on a small model on your own machine, so there is no subscription and no per-token bill. And it stays private: you're not pasting commands full of file paths, hostnames and project names into a chat website to work out what they do. With the default local model, your requests never leave your computer.

Requirements

• macOS or Linux
• uv. It installs Python 3.13 or later for you if needed.
• A model served over an OpenAI-compatible API. The default is gemma4:e4b on Ollama: ollama pull gemma4:e4b

Install

uv tool install thetaterm

Quickstart

tterm -q "list files in this directory, largest first"

$ ls -lS .
Run it? [Y/n]:

New to it? Follow the tutorial.

Usage

tterm                                  # interactive
tterm -q "find files modified in the last 2 days"
tterm -m qwen2.5-coder:3b -q "replace foo with bar in notes.txt in place"   # another model
tterm -y -q "show git status"          # run without confirming
tterm --think -q "show the date 30 days from now"   # model reasons first, about 2x slower

Warning: -y runs whatever the model writes, unreviewed. In interactive mode that applies to every line you type. Commands pass a syntax check, not a safety check.

Commands that look like they reach outside the current directory (absolute, ~ or .. paths, variables such as $HOME, cd home or back, or sudo) are shown in red and always ask first, defaulting to no, even with -y. This is a pattern match, not a sandbox. See the safety model.

Settings (THETATERM_MODEL, THETATERM_BASE_URL, THETATERM_API_KEY) are read from the environment or ~/.config/thetaterm/.env, never from a .env in the current directory. See the command-line reference and how to use another model server.

Documentation

• Documentation index: tutorial, how-to guides, reference, explanation and design decisions
• Contributing: development setup, needs just
• Security policy
• Changelog

License

Apache-2.0