SmartMan is a command-line interface tool designed to generate summaries, examples, and custom commands based on user intent using man pages and large language models (LLMs). This tool aims to simplify the process of retrieving and understanding command-line documentation.
- Generate concise summaries of man pages
- Display practical usage examples for specific commands
- Create custom commands based on natural language descriptions
- Interactive mode for continuous querying
- Support for multiple LLM providers (OpenAI and Anthropic)
- Response caching to reduce API calls and improve speed
To install the SmartMan tool, you can either install via pip or clone the repository.
pip install smartman
For development:
python3 -m venv ~/venvs/smartman
source ~/venvs/smartman/bin/activate
pip install -e .
git clone https://github.com/sajid-karim/smartman.git
cd smartman
pip install -r requirements.txt
Before using the tool, you need to configure your LLM API key. You can do this in two ways:
Set one of the following environment variables:
export OPENAI_API_KEY='your-key-here'
export ANTH_API_KEY='your-key-here'
Create a configuration file at ~/.smartman/config.yaml
with the following content:
# For OpenAI
LLM_API_KEY: your_openai_key_here
PROVIDER: openai # Optional, defaults to openai
MODEL: gpt-4o # Optional, defaults to gpt-4o
# OR for Anthropic
LLM_API_KEY: your_anthropic_key_here
PROVIDER: anthropic
MODEL: claude-3-opus-20240229 # Optional
You can find a sample configuration file in config.example.yaml
.
Once installed and configured, you can use the SmartMan tool with the following commands:
To generate a summary for a given command:
# Using the installed command
smartman summary ls
# OR using the module directly
python -m smartman.main summary ls
To display usage examples for a specific command:
smartman example grep
# OR
python -m smartman.main example grep
To create a command based on your intent:
smartman generate "find all PDF files modified in the last 7 days"
# OR
python -m smartman.main generate "find all PDF files modified in the last 7 days"
For continuous interaction with the tool:
smartman interactive
# Then type commands like:
# summary ls
# example grep
# generate "count lines in all python files"
# exit
To simplify running the SmartMan tool, you can add a shortcut alias to your shell profile. This alias allows you to run the tool using the command llm-man
instead of typing out smartman
.
To set up the alias, run the following command in your terminal:
setup-smartman-alias
This command will add the alias to your shell profile (e.g. .bashrc
, .bash_profile
, or .zshrc
). After running the command, reload your shell (or source the profile) with:
source ~/.bashrc
# or
source ~/.bash_profile
# or for zsh users:
source ~/.zshrc
Now you can run the tool using the shorter command. For example:
llm-man summary ls
llm-man example grep
llm-man generate "find all PDF files modified in the last 7 days"
By default, responses are cached to improve performance and reduce API calls. The cache is stored in ~/.smartman/cache/. To disable caching, set use_cache: False in your config file.
SmartMan has a comprehensive test suite designed to ensure reliability and make contributions easier.
To run the tests:
pip install pytest
pytest
The test suite includes:
- Unit tests for core functionality
- Mock-based tests to avoid API dependencies
- Tests for error handling and edge cases
- Examples of testing techniques for contributors
For more details on the testing approach and how to add new tests, see tests/README.md.
Contributions are welcome! Please read the contributing.md guidelines for how to contribute to this project.
Before submitting a pull request:
- Ensure your code adheres to the project's coding style
- Add tests for any new functionality
- Verify that all tests pass with
pytest
- Update documentation as needed
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.