What if your terminal could speak like Gandalf?

I built tolkienizer — a command-line tool that takes ordinary text and rewrites it in the voice of J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium. Commit messages become chronicles. Error logs become dark prophecies. Meeting notes become council proceedings.

Quick Demo

$ tolkienizer "I need to fix the authentication bug before the release"

→ "A shadow has fallen upon the Gates of Trust, and ere the new dawn is proclaimed to the realm, the breach must be sealed — lest all who pass beyond find themselves unrecognized by the guardians of the threshold."

Why C99?

I wanted something that:

1. Starts instantly — no Python interpreter, no Node cold start

2. Has minimal dependencies — just libcurl (HTTP) and cJSON (parsing)

3. Feels native to the terminal — like grep, sed, or curl

4. Compiles everywhere — macOS and Linux with a simple make

The resulting binary is ~80KB and launches in milliseconds.

The Four Styles

tolkienizer ships with 4 carefully crafted narrative modes:

Multi-Language, Multi-Provider

• 5 native languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German — each with 4 style-specific prompts hand-tuned for literary register.

• Auto-detect mode: Detects your input language and elevates it.

• Custom languages: Pass any language code (-l ja, -l pt, -l la).

Works with OpenAI, Groq, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, or Ollama for fully offline local inference.

Unix Composability

tolkienizer plays nicely with pipes:

git log -1 --pretty=%B | tolkienizer echo "deploy failed" | tolkienizer -s mordor tolkienizer -f meeting\_notes.txt > epic\_chronicle.txt

Install

brew install nnevskij/tap/tolkienizer

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/nnevskij/tolkienizer.git cd tolkienizer && make && make install

The Vibe-Coding Disclaimer

The entire project was developed through vibe-coding with AI pair programming. But here's the thing: vibe-coding with awareness is not the same as blindly copy-pasting AI output.

Every architectural decision was deliberate: choosing C99 over a scripting language, the libcurl/cJSON stack, the chmod 0600 config security model, the getopt_long CLI interface, the prompt structure across 20 system prompts.

I reviewed and understood every line. AI accelerated the creative flow; engineering judgment steered the ship. The result is clean, POSIX-compliant C that builds with zero warnings on both macOS and Linux.

MIT Licensed → https://github.com/nnevskij/tolkienizer

Give it a star if the One Ring compels you ⭐