OWLEN – terminal User Interface LLM client for Ollama

OWLEN is a Rust-powered, terminal-first interface for interacting with local large language models.

It provides a responsive chat workflow that runs against Ollama with a focus on developer productivity, vim-style navigation, and seamless session management—all without leaving your terminal.

This is free and open source software.

Features include:

• Chat Client (owlen):
  • Vim-style Navigation – Normal, editing, visual, and command modes.
  • Streaming Responses – Real-time token streaming from Ollama.
  • Multi-Panel Interface – Separate panels for chat, thinking content, and input.
  • Advanced Text Editing – Multi-line input with tui-textarea, history navigation.
  • Visual Selection & Clipboard – Yank/paste text across panels.
  • Flexible Scrolling – Half-page, full-page, and cursor-based navigation.
  • Model Management – Interactive model and provider selection.
  • Command Autocompletion – Intelligent Tab completion and suggestions in command mode.
  • Session Persistence – Save and load conversations to/from disk.
  • AI-Generated Descriptions – Automatic short summaries for saved sessions.
  • Session Management – Start new conversations, clear history, browse saved sessions.
  • Thinking Mode Support – Dedicated panel for extended reasoning content.
  • Bracketed Paste – Safe paste handling for multi-line content.
  • Theming System – 10 built-in themes plus custom theme support.
• Code Client (owlen-code) [Experimental]:
  • All chat client features.
  • Optimized system prompt for programming assistance.
  • Foundation for future code-specific features.
• Core Infrastructure:
  • Modular Architecture – Separated core logic, TUI components, and providers.
  • Provider System – Extensible provider trait (currently: Ollama).
  • Session Controller – Unified conversation and state management.
  • Configuration Management – TOML-based config with sensible defaults.
  • Message Formatting – Markdown rendering, thinking content extraction.
  • Async Runtime – Built on Tokio for efficient streaming.

Website: somegit.dev/Owlibou/owlen
Support:
Developer: Jordan Cannon
License: MIT License

OWLEN is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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