Aider Commands Handout

Owner: Vadim Rudakov, lefthand67@gmail.com
Version: 0.2.0
Birth: 2025-11-18
Last Modified: 2026-01-13

Aider is an AI pair programmer that uses your code as context.

1. Installation and Setup¶

Args that start with -- can be set in a config file. The config file uses YAML syntax and must represent a YAML ‘mapping’ (for details, see http://learn.getgrav.org/advanced/yaml).

2. Using proxy¶

If your organization requires all external traffic to be routed through the proxy, you can set these environment variables and pass them to the terminal session before starting the aider:

export HTTPS_PROXY="http://[user:password]@proxy_ip_address:port"
export https_proxy="http://[user:password]@proxy_ip_address:port"

You should NOT set HTTP_PROXY variable because it breaks the connection between the aider and local ollama through http://127.0.0.1:11434.

You can wrap this configuration into a script wrapper aider_proxy.sh:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail


main() {

    export HTTPS_PROXY="http://[user:password]@proxy_ip_address:port"
    export https_proxy="http://[user:password]@proxy_ip_address:port"

    exec aider "$@"
}


main "$@"

Make this script executable and add it to your PATH. Now you can run aider simply:

$ aider_proxy.sh --model gemini/gemini-3-flash

Avoid using proxy if it’s not necessary for it adds complexity to the aider configuration.

3. Running & Basic Usage¶

Launching aider¶

Core File Management¶

Using the Repository Map¶

The Repository Map provides a structural overview (file/function) of your project, helping the AI understand context without loading the entire codebase, thus saving tokens. Use --map-tokens to manage this resource (default is 1024 tokens).

In-Chat Commands¶

4. Upgrading¶