ttychatter - the terminal based Gemini (LLM) client

remfan1994 · 2026-05-22 02:57:45

I am posting on the Arch forums because I believe my software project is most likely not of zero interest to the community! How many people run terminal emulators, tty, and text-mode software around here? ALL OF US, of course!

Now you know how AI interfaces are, cumbersome web-based designs that load slow and run worse than most computer software has ever run. Well, I couldn't stand it anymore, and thought, "there is no reason we chat over a web browser. It's just chat!"

Thus began ttychatter, (GitHub: https://github.com/remfan1994/ttychatter. This project is humble yet purposeful and productive. There are two bash versions, one with python and one without. Then there is an ncurses.

At first, it was just bash/python and I thought, "ncurses would solve a lot of the problems I'm encountering here" and so the ncurses version began.

In the process of that, I recursively considered that to scale down is prudent, and a bash-only version (with no python) is also available.

I tried to keep the most features possible in all three versions, obviously ncurses is able to accomodate the most ability. The goal is to be robust, everything necessary to get the work done with AI - history saving and loading, memory and memory editing, and so on and so forth. There is ample documentation available on the repo, including manpages specific to each version. Every version of the program is a single standalone file that can be chmodded +x and executed by itself.

The license is fully liberal (free to modify, redistribute, etc so long as you're not malicious) and I encourage Arch to consider spinning off their own version that might be worthy of their community repository.

thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy ttychatter.

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Edit: link fixed
This post is all hand-written by a human author I assure you! Would it even matter if it wasn't? The content is the purpose, does the post get the message across... not how the post was composed...

Last edited by remfan1994 (2026-05-22 19:09:46)

256 · 2026-05-22 06:10:11

Please modify the title to clarify that you mean Gemini as in the LLM, not the internet protocol.

Also, your post reads like an LLM wrote it. How do you "recursively consider" something? What does that even mean?

seth · 2026-05-22 06:52:15

"thought on" - could just be AI translated

AI posts are usually better formatted and the upstream link is 404 because of the tailing brace.

remfan1994 · 2026-05-22 19:06:54

256 wrote:

How do you "recursively consider" something? What does that even mean?

I'm glad you asked that, my pleasure to respond:
Because the idea is web interfaces are bloated and clumsy, so to fall back to the terminal is the refuge to efficiency. Then, to also include a bash-only version without python dependencies is the next level of the very strategy that spawned the project, and is therefore "recursive"...

Like remembering where you came from, and because the project started in the spirit of minimalism, to maintain a minimalist version is therefore recursivity. This is important philosophically and moralistically.
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Edit: Above is human-generated, plus I asked AI to clarify for you. Does it read more understandably?

ChatGPT wrote:

the project rejects unnecessary layers,
so preserving a dependency-light implementation is the same philosophy applied recursively inward.
The project exists because browser-based AI interfaces are often resource-heavy, opaque, and inefficient for users who already live in the terminal.
So the Bash-only implementation applies the same design philosophy recursively to the project itself: if the terminal is the refuge from browser bloat, then a dependency-light shell implementation is the refuge from unnecessary runtime dependencies.
The Python and ncurses versions are the feature-rich reference implementations, but the Bash-only version preserves the original minimalist philosophy of the project.
It is less about nostalgia and more about maintaining a low-dependency, inspectable, portable implementation path.

Last edited by remfan1994 (2026-05-22 19:15:13)

Arch Linux

#1 2026-05-22 02:57:45

ttychatter - the terminal based Gemini (LLM) client

#2 2026-05-22 06:10:11

Re: ttychatter - the terminal based Gemini (LLM) client

#3 2026-05-22 06:52:15

Re: ttychatter - the terminal based Gemini (LLM) client

#4 2026-05-22 19:06:54

Re: ttychatter - the terminal based Gemini (LLM) client

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