This package offers an alternative way to manage your gptel-directives variable, using files rather than customizing the variable directly.

You can get started using the following configuration:

(use-package gptel-prompts
  :after (gptel)
  :demand t
  :config
  (gptel-prompts-update)
  ;; Ensure prompts are updated if prompt files change
  (gptel-prompts-add-update-watchers))

Whenever your prompt files change, you must arrange for gptel-prompts-update to be called, which will update gptel-directives appropriately.

You may now put prompts, one per file, in the directory gptel-prompts-directory, which by default is "~/.emacs.d/prompts". Prompts may be one of three different kinds:

If the file extension is .txt, .md or .org, the content of the file is used directly, as if you had added that string to gptel-directives.

If the file extension is .el, the file must evaluate to a list of strings and/or symbols, as expected by gptel-directives. Please see the documentation of that variable for more information.

Based on the standard set by Prompt Poet, files ending in .poet or .jinja will be interpreted as YAML files using Jinja templating. The templating is applied first, before it is parsed as a YAML file.

This is done dynamically, at the time the prompt is used, so you can see the results of your expansion using GPTel’s Inspect capabilities when gptel-expert-commands is set to a non-nil value. Here is an example poet prompt.:

- role: system
  content: >-
    You are an Latin-American Spanish translator, spelling corrector and
    improver. I will speak to you in English, and you will translate and
    answer in the corrected and improved version of my text, in Latin-American
    Spanish. I want you to replace my simplified A0-level words and sentences
    with more beautiful and elegant, upper level Latin-American Spanish words
    and sentences. Keep the meaning same, but make them more literary and
    clear. I want you to only reply with the correction, the improvements and
    nothing else, do not write explanations.

- role: user
  content: |
    Please translate the following into Spanish. The time is {{ current_time }}:

Note the >- and | content directives, which are used to manage when and where newlines appear in the actual prompts, while allowing the file itself to use what is easiest to maintain in the editor.

NOTE: If you wish to use the Prompt Poet format, you will need to install the Emacs dependencies yaml and templatel.

Using templatel template inheritance with extends and block requires creating a base template that generates a valid YAML file. Block statements on child templates should be written so that YAML indentation is not broken, otherwise a YAML parse error is raised.

Template inheritance base directory can be customized using the custom variable gptel-prompts-template-base-directory which accepts either a directory or a function that returns a directory, defaulting to either the prompt poet file directory or default-directory.

The templatel environment can be replaced by customizing the variable gptel-prompts-get-template-env-function and setting it to a function that receives as arguments a prompt and an optional file and returns a templatel environment.

The default templatel environmentd can be extended by customizing the variable gptel-prompts-prepare-template-env-functions with a list of functions, each function receives the templatel environment. Here is an example of adding a templatel filter named nindent which indents the string according to the provided number of characters n, similar to the Helm chart nindent filter.

(defun my/templatel-filter-nindent (s n)
  "Adds `n' spaces after each newline character."
  (let ((indent-string (make-string n ? )))
    (replace-regexp-in-string "\n" (concat "\n" indent-string) s)))

(defun my/prepare-gptel-prompts-templatel-env (env)
  (templatel-env-add-filter env "nindent" #'my/templatel-filter-nindent))

(setopt gptel-prompts-template-env-prepare-functions
  (list #'my/prepare-gptel-prompts-templatel-env))

Example usage:

base.md:

- role: system
  content: >-
    base for prompt
    {% block content %}{% endblock %}

test.poet:

{% extends "base.md" %}

{% block content %}{{ "hello

world some
prompt text here

" | nindent(4) }}{% endblock %}