Ever wished you could ask AI from anywhere without needing an interface? Imagine just typing ? and your question in any terminal the moment it pops into your head, and getting the answer right away! In this post, I explain how I wrote a tiny shell script that turns this idea into reality, transforming the terminal into a universal AI client. You can query Reka, OpenAI, or a local Ollama model from any editor, tab, or pipeline—no GUI, no heavy clients, no friction.
Small, lightweight, and surprisingly powerful: once you make it part of your workflow, it becomes indispensable.
💡 All the code scripts are available at: https://github.com/reka-ai/terminal-tools
The Core Idea
There is almost always a terminal within reach—embedded in your editor, sitting in a spare tab, or already where you live while building, debugging, and piping data around. So why break your flow to open a separate chat UI? I wanted to just type a single character (?) plus my question and get an answer right there. No window hopping. No heavy client.
How It Works
The trick is delightfully small: send a single JSON POST request to whichever AI provider you feel like (Reka, OpenAI, Ollama locally, etc.):
# Example: Reka
curl https://api.reka.ai/v1/chat
-H "X-Api-Key: <API_KEY>"
-d {
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "What is the origin of thanksgiving?"
}
],
"model": "reka-core",
"stream": false
}
# Example: Ollama local
curl http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/chat
-d {
"model": "llama3",
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "What is the origin of thanksgiving?"
}],
"stream": false
}
Once we get the response, we extract the answer field from it. A thin shell wrapper turns that into a universal “ask” verb for your terminal. Add a short alias (?) and you have the most minimalist AI client imaginable.
Let's go into the details
Let me walk you through the core script step-by-step using reka-chat.sh, so you can customize it the way you like. Maybe this is a good moment to mention that Reka has a free tier that's more than enough for this. Go grab your key—after all, it's free!
The script (reka-chat.sh) does four things:
- Captures your question
- Loads an API key from
~/.config/reka/api_key - Sends a JSON payload to the chat endpoint with
curl. - Extracts the answer using
jqfor clean plain text.
1. Capture Your Question
This part of the script is a pure laziness hack. I wanted to save keystrokes by not requiring quotes when passing a question as an argument. So ? What is 32C in F works just as well as ? "What is 32C in F".
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
if [ ! -t 0 ]; then
QUERY="$(cat)"
else
exit 1
fi
else
QUERY="$*"
fi
2. Load Your API Key
If you're running Ollama locally you don't need any key, but for all other AI providers you do. I store mine in a locked-down file at ~/.config/reka/api_key, then read and trim trailing whitespace like this:
API_KEY_FILE="$HOME/.config/reka/api_key"
API_KEY=$(cat "$API_KEY_FILE" | tr -d '[:space:]')
3. Send The JSON Payload
Building the JSON payload is the heart of the script, including the API_ENDPOINT, API_KEY, and obviously our QUERY. Here’s how I do it for Reka:
RESPONSE=$(curl -s -X POST "$API_ENDPOINT" \
-H "X-Api-Key: $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d "{
\"messages\": [
{
\"role\": \"user\",
\"content\": $(echo "$QUERY" | jq -R -s .)
}
],
\"model\": \"reka-core\",
\"stream\": false
}")
4. Extract The Answer
Finally, we parse the JSON response with jq to pull out just the answer text. If jq isn't installed we display the raw response, but a formatted answer is much nicer. If you are customizing for another provider, you may need to adjust the JSON path here. You can add echo "$RESPONSE" >> data_sample.json to the script to log raw responses for tinkering.
With Reka, the response look like this:
{
"id": "cb7c371b-3a7b-48d2-829d-70ffacf565c6",
"model": "reka-core",
"usage": {
"input_tokens": 16,
"output_tokens": 460,
"reasoning_tokens": 0
},
"responses": [
{
"finish_reason": "stop",
"message": {
"role": "assistant",
"content": " The origin of Thanksgiving ..."
}
}
]
}
echo "$RESPONSE" | jq -r '.responses[0].message.content // .error // "Error: Unexpected response format"'
Putting It All Together
Now that we have the script, make it executable with chmod +x reka-chat.sh, and let's add an alias to your shell config to make it super easy to use. Add one line to your .zshrc or .bashrc that looks like this:
alias \\?=\"$REKA_CHAT_SCRIPT\"
Because ? is a special character in the shell, we escape it with a backslash. After adding this line, reload your shell configuration with source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bashrc, and you are all set!
The Result
Now you can ask questions directly from your terminal. Wanna know what is origin of Thanksgiving, ask it like this:
? What is the origin of Thanksgiving
And if you want to keep the quotes, please you do you!
Extra: Web research
I couldn't stop there! Reka also supports web research, which means it can fetch and read web pages to provide more informed answers. Following the same pattern described previously, I wrote a similar script called reka-research.sh that sends a request to Reka's research endpoint. This obviously takes a bit more time to answer, as it's making different web queries and processing them, but the results are often worth the wait—and they are up to date! I used the alias ?? for this one.
On the GitHub repository, you can find both scripts (reka-chat.sh and reka-research.sh) along with a script to create the aliases automatically. Feel free to customize them to fit your workflow and preferred AI provider. Enjoy the newfound superpower of instant AI access right from your terminal!
What's Next?
With this setup, the possibilities are endless. Reka supports questions related to audio and video, which could be interesting to explore next. The project is open source, so feel free to contribute or suggest improvements. You can also join the Reka community on Discord to share your experiences and learn from others.
