I’ve written a couple of posts about Álvaro Ramírez’s implementation of Emacs shells for ChatGPT and DALL-E. After he wrote those, he noticed that they shared a lot of code so, of course, he abstracted that code out into a separate package of functions.
The result is a wrapper around comint, shell-maker, that makes it easy to build a specialized shell. He offers a trivial example of a shell, greeter-shell that accepts a name, X, and responds with Hello "/X/". That’s not terribly useful, of course, but it takes just a few lines of code—most of it boilerplate—to implement.
Right now shell-maker is bundled with chatgpt-shell but Ramírez says he will break it out to a separate package if there’s enough interest. Regardless, if you want to implement a specialized shell—whether or not it’s in service of the hot new AI apps—the shell-maker package is an easy way to do that without worrying about the intricacies of Comint. Take a look at Ramírez’s post for the details.