I haven’t fully jumped on the AI hype train, but I’ve kept an eye on the evolving technologies of the past two decades. It used to be that Cloud was the buzzword, then Containers, and maybe blockchain (never got into this one), and now AI.

At first, AI felt like a nice gimmick—discussing things with a chatbot felt a bit like doing a Google search but with a conversational twist. The problem with chatbots was that funny feeling you’d get when it seemed like they were just making things up.

But so much has changed since the first release of ChatGPT. Things have gotten way, way better.

It’s nice to have Copilot occasionally enabled for my open-source work to learn and get advanced code completions. It’s nice to have a chatbot that can answer questions about my code. It’s even nice to have one that helps with my writing. It is, indeed, useful.

But so far I wanted to go beyond that and play around with the AI APIs out there and see if I could go a bit beyond these use cases.

GitHub offers a playground with a variety of APIs, making it easier to tinker with small ideas and use cases.

A Couple of Personal Use Cases

One thing I wanted was a way to generate those easy, trivial commit messages for my code. I started writing a tool for this until I discovered that the copilot-chat.el mode integrates nicely with Magit, so I didn’t need to do much there except some configurationhttps://gitlab.com/chmouel/emacs-config/-/blob/main/lisp/init-copilot.el?ref_type=heads#L31 for it.

Another thing that’s always annoyed me is writing French accents on my English keyboard. On Linux, I need to use Right-ALT and do mental gymnastics to type them. I have a custom keyboard with macros that make it easier, but I still don’t like writing them—and to be honest, I’m not even sure where to properly place them half the time. So, when I write to family or friends in French from my computer, it always looks weird.

To address this, I built a little tool called aichmou to help. It plugs into Sway on Linux and also works with Alfred on macOS.

How It Works

Aichmou supports a bunch of models using the GitHub model marketplace free API for those with access. It also works with Google Gemini and Groq, which have free APIs.

Here’s how I use it:

  • I select my text, press a key combo (Super+X for me),
  • Sway intercepts it with this configuration:
bindsym $super+x exec copyq selection | $HOME/go/src/github.com/chmouel/aichmou/.venv/bin/python3 $HOME/go/src/github.com/chmouel/aichmou/ai -N spell && wtype -M ctrl -M shift v
  • Launching CopyQ to grab the current selection. (If you don’t use CopyQ as your clipboard manager, you can probably use something else.).
  • The text is sent to Aichmou, which queries an available and non-rate-limited LLM for the correction to make.
  • The result is copied back to the clipboard and typed into the frontmost application using wtype tool.

The Results

Here is a little demo of it in action:

Conclusion

It’s simple and save me a lot of time, and I’m happy with it. And I can easily built on this for some other use cases on that tool if needed in the future.

Here is the link to the tool: