kit

A tiny AI sidekick for your terminal — get the right command for your shell,
fix an email, translate a text. Starts in milliseconds, runs on your ChatGPT plan.

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kit (short for KI-Terminal, and yes, a nod to K.I.T.T.) handles the small things in between, without opening a browser or a full coding agent. Ask kit -c "restart the computer" in PowerShell and you get Restart-Computer, not a click path through the Start menu: kit knows your OS, your shell and whether you are admin. Copy a text, run kit -m, and the corrected version is already back in your clipboard.

Ships as a single ~2.5 MB binary, with no runtime and no dependencies.

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Install

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jli-software/kit/master/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jli-software/kit/master/install.ps1 | iex

Run the same command again to update. The installers verify the SHA256 checksum and add kit to your PATH. Pin a version with KIT_VERSION=v0.12.0; change the target folder with KIT_INSTALL_DIR.

From source: cargo install --git https://github.com/jli-software/kit

Sign in

kit uses your ChatGPT subscription through the Codex CLI login, so no API key is needed:

codex login

kit reads the tokens from ~/.codex/auth.json and refreshes them on its own. Requests count towards your ChatGPT usage limits. The Codex backend is not an official public API and may change.

Prefer API keys? Set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or DEEPSEEK_API_KEY and pick that provider in the config.

Usage

Command	What it does
kit -c "question"	Terminal assistant: the command for your current shell and OS (copied to the clipboard)
kit -c	Terminal assistant, interactive
kit	Interactive chat
kit "question"	Chat, starting with a question
kit -m	Proofread an email (from clipboard, or kit -m "text")
kit -ma	Proofread and improve wording
kit -mp	Rewrite in a professional business tone
kit -t	Translate German ↔ English
kit -r	Resume a previous chat (kit -r -c for terminal chats)

Results are copied to the clipboard automatically; with -c only the command is copied. Before each -c question, kit tells the model your OS and version, the shell it was started from (PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, cmd, Git Bash, bash, zsh, fish, Nushell …), whether the session has admin/root rights and the current folder.

You can also pipe text in:

cat app.log | kit "Summarize the errors"
cat error.txt | kit -c "How do I fix this?"
cat email.txt | kit -m

After a piped question, kit stays open for follow-ups. Press Ctrl+C to stop an answer; the chat is saved.

Configuration

kit -s opens ~/.config/KIterminal/config.json. You can set a provider and model per mode:

"email": {
  "provider": "codex",
  "model": "gpt-6-luna",
  "max_tokens": 2048,
  "reasoning_effort": "low"
}

• Providers: codex (default), anthropic, deepseek
• Models: for codex, any model your ChatGPT plan offers in Codex. The default is gpt-6-luna, the small, cheap one.
• Reasoning effort: none, low, medium, high
• Answer language: "language": "de". Supported: en, de, chde, fr, es, it, pt, nl.

kit -e <mode> edits the system prompt of a mode. kit -i resets everything to defaults.

Development

cargo test
cargo run -- -t "Hallo Welt"

CI runs fmt, clippy and the tests on Linux, Windows and macOS. To release, bump the version in Cargo.toml, add a CHANGELOG.md entry and push a tag (git tag v0.12.0 && git push origin v0.12.0). GitHub Actions then builds the binaries and publishes the release.

License

MIT — JLI-Software