Claude in my terminal

5 June 2025

Inspired by kqr’s post about calling LLMs from the terminal, I decided to set up llm and create my own q script.

Setting up `llm`

There’s a couple ways you can install llm and I decided to use uv:

uv tool install llm

(mise users can run mise use -g uv first to install uv)

I want to use Claude but by default llm only supports OpenAI’s GPTs, so I had to install the llm-anthropic plugin:

llm install llm-anthropic

Then I configured my API key by running the following and pasting in my key when prompted:

llm keys set anthropic

llm is now configured and ready to use! You can test your configuration with:

llm -m claude-4-opus 'Impress me with wild facts about turnips'

The `q` script

With Claude’s help, I tweaked kqr’s script to let me craft a prompt in my text editor if none is provided:

#!/usr/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    # No arguments - open editor with temp file
    tmpfile=$(mktemp)
    ${EDITOR:-nvim} "$tmpfile"

    # Check if file has content after editing
    if [ -s "$tmpfile" ]; then
        # Replace arguments with file contents
        set -- "$(cat "$tmpfile")"
    else
        rm -f "$tmpfile"
        exit 0
    fi

    # Clean up temp file
    rm -f "$tmpfile"
fi

llm -s "Answer in as few words as possible. Use a brief style with short replies." -m anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-0 "$*"

Finally, I saved the above script to ~/.local/bin/q and made it executable with chmod +x ~/.local/bin/q.

#llm

Setting up llm #

The q script #

Setting up `llm`

The `q` script