Optional steps

The steps below are completely optional.

Store your api keys

You can store your api keys in a .env file and they will be loaded automatically whenever you run aider.

Enable Playwright

Aider supports adding web pages to the chat with the /web <url> command. When you add a url to the chat, aider fetches the page and scrapes its content.

By default, aider uses the httpx library to scrape web pages, but this only works on a subset of web pages. Some sites explicitly block requests from tools like httpx. Others rely heavily on javascript to render the page content, which isn’t possible using only httpx.

Aider works best with all web pages if you install Playwright’s chromium browser and its dependencies:

playwright install --with-deps chromium

See the Playwright for Python documentation for additional information.

Enable voice coding

Aider supports coding with your voice using the in-chat /voice command. Aider uses the PortAudio library to capture audio. Installing PortAudio is completely optional, but can usually be accomplished like this:

  • For Windows, there is no need to install PortAudio.
  • For Mac, do brew install portaudio
  • For Linux, do sudo apt-get install libportaudio2

Add aider to your editor

Other projects have integrated aider into some IDE/editors. It’s not clear if they are tracking the latest versions of aider, so it may be best to just run the latest aider in a terminal alongside your editor.

NeoVim

joshuavial provided a NeoVim plugin for aider:

https://github.com/joshuavial/aider.nvim

VS Code

joshuavial also confirmed that aider works inside a VS Code terminal window. Aider detects if it is running inside VSCode and turns off pretty/color output, since the VSCode terminal doesn’t seem to support it well.

MattFlower provided a VSCode plugin for aider:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MattFlower.aider

Other editors

If you are interested in creating an aider plugin for your favorite editor, please let me know by opening a GitHub issue.

Install the development version of aider

If you want the very latest development version of aider you can install directly from GitHub:

python -m pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider.git

If you’ve git cloned the aider repository already, you can install “live” from your local copy. This is mostly useful if you are developing aider and want your current modifications to take effect immediately.

python -m pip install -e .