📁 Add local/remote context files to your prompts

[banjo]

📁 Add local/remote context files to your prompts

Hello guys!

I recently opened a thread here about being able to import cursor files directly to my chat. I couldn't find anything for it, so I recently made my first ever Lua extension to do exactly that. (I don't really know the best practices for Lua extension development but at least it works!)

It is called contextfiles.nvim.

So what it basically does in a nutshell:

• 🔍 Scan a selected directory for rule files (for example the same directory that cursor, windsurf or any other IDE uses)
• ☁️ Import rules directly from Github Gists in case you want to share between projects
• 👀 Uses glob patterns to only apply it to the correct files

Use within CodeCompanion 🧑‍💻

As my only real use case was to use it in CodeCompanion, I managed to some core functionality up and running, with an extension part for CodeCompanion. What you do is basically just create a new prompt that will get populated with the matching context files:

["context"] = {
  strategy = "chat",
  description = "Chat with context files",
  opts = {
    -- ...
  },
  prompts = {
    {
      role = "user",
      opts = {
        contains_code = true,
      },
      content = function(context)
        local ctx = require("contextfiles.extensions.codecompanion")

        local ctx_opts = {
          -- ...
        }
        local format_opts = {
          -- ...
        }

        return ctx.get(context.filename, ctx_opts, format_opts)
      end,
    },
  },
}

And now, whenever you open a new chat buffer with that prompt, all the necessary context will be populated for your current file 🎉

There are probably a lot of things missing in the plugin, and also much better ways to integrate it into CodeCompanion, but this was at least a working start for me. Would love to help integrate it more in case other people than me would find it helpful.

[olimorris]

This sounds amazing. I was pondering whether there was place for cursor rules in the plugin. How does this compare to workspaces?

Do you have an example context file you could share, for users starting from zero?

[banjo]

Interesting, I completely get the use of workspaces.

I noticed, with only one or two files provided as context for the LLMs, the output was much more similar to the code style of the repo and my liking. So taking time to summarize your most shared part of the repo in a file like codecompanion-workspace.json is actually brilliant.

CodeCompanion is probably my must used extension whilst developing, if you would need any help or if there are things I could contribute to, to make the plugin better I would love to help! :)

[olimorris]

if you would need any help or if there are things I could contribute to, to make the plugin better I would love to help! :)

@banjo I want to bounce an idea off you...I think there's a solution where cursorrules and the current workspace implementation meet. This article has given me some more info on how they work under in Cursor.

I use workspaces regularly, they save me sooooo much time when it comes to sharing context and the output from the LLM is multiples better than when I don't use them. For big projects though, I don't think workspaces scale too well and as a format for storage, I hate JSON.

I also think there's a lot of opportunity to build on cursorrules to include things like gists, and groupings of files etc.

What are your thoughts? Would this be something you'd like to contribute?

[hanipcode]

actually my team are starting to use cursor rules and adding .cursor/rules file to the company repo.
I believe there are also teams in other companies that does this as well
So if it supported within codecompanion it would be really great.
But I also understand if codecompanion choose to not support it internally and we need to rely on extension for this

[banjo]

if you would need any help or if there are things I could contribute to, to make the plugin better I would love to help! :)

@banjo I want to bounce an idea off you...I think there's a solution where cursorrules and the current workspace implementation meet. This article has given me some more info on how they work under in Cursor.

I use workspaces regularly, they save me sooooo much time when it comes to sharing context and the output from the LLM is multiples better than when I don't use them. For big projects though, I don't think workspaces scale too well and as a format for storage, I hate JSON.

I also think there's a lot of opportunity to build on cursorrules to include things like gists, and groupings of files etc.

What are your thoughts? Would this be something you'd like to contribute?

Interesting article. I felt like this specific Cursor feature was a bit under documented, so that article made things make a bit more sense.

Being able to create a workspace with JSON is great, but I think there are at least 2 times when they might be a bit hard to maintain:

• On a large repo, where there are too many files to try to include and document
• Whenever not too many people use Neovim in the team, so they rely on other solutions for their LLMs (if they even use any).

I have no sources to back this statement up, but I feel like the community is heading towards adapting the dynamic pattern context for LLMs, especially Cursor's take on it. And In my personal opinion, it is probably a bit easier to scale for large repos. If nothing else, I think it might be a great enhancement to the current workspace implementation. Best of both worlds.

So yes, I would love to try to contribute to try to make that approach a part of CodeCompanion! :)

[jongschneider]

After reading this blog and understanding how the author uses cursorrules my head is spinning. Would love to see this feature implemented in codecompanion.

With that said, I literally just tried codecompanion out this morning and have been messing around getting it set up all day. I really like it. Great work @olimorris ! I'm excited to continue using it.

[hanipcode]

The plugin looks great, I Will try it. Thanks @banjo