hmanlab

A terminal UI for chatting with local Ollama models — plus BYOK providers (z.ai, Ollama Cloud, OpenCode Go) — built in Rust with ratatui.

# Global install
npm install -g hmanlab

# Run once without installing
npx hmanlab

# Per-project (e.g. add to a repo's dev deps)
npm install --save-dev hmanlab
npx hmanlab

Quick start

After installing, run:

hmanlab

On first launch, hmanlab asks for an API key. Register a free account at hmanlab.senireka.my → API keys, paste the bai_… key when prompted, and you're in. The TUI itself is free.

Who provides the LLM?

You do. hmanlab is a frontend — it doesn't host or proxy any model. Plug in either:

• Your local Ollama — runs entirely on your machine, no traffic leaves your network. Default and fully free.
• Your own provider key (BYOK) — z.ai, Ollama Cloud, or OpenCode Go. hmanlab stores the key locally (mode 0600) and talks to the provider directly; the hmanlab backend never sees it.

What does the hmanlab API key do?

It authenticates the TUI to the hmanlab.senireka.my backend that stores your chat sessions so you can resume them later (/sessions, /load, /more, cross-device history). Without a key the TUI still runs against your local Ollama / BYOK provider — you just lose saved-session sync.

Features

• Streaming replies, agentic tool calls (read_file, edit_file, run_command, git, find), foldable <think> blocks
• BYOK providers: z.ai (subscription + usage), Ollama Cloud, OpenCode Go
• Session persistence via hmanlab-api, with /sessions, /load, /more
• Workspace sidebar with click-to-expand folders, scroll, click-to-open file viewer
• /compact slash command + automatic compaction at high context tokens; compactions are persisted to <workspace>/.hmanlab/memory/compact-current.md so the model can resume across sessions
• Memory store at ~/.hmanlab/memory/ (user-scope) and <workspace>/.hmanlab/memory/ (project-scope), surfaced to the model every turn

Supported platforms

Prebuilt binaries ship for:

• linux-x64, linux-arm64 (musl, statically-linked)
• darwin-x64, darwin-arm64
• win32-x64

On other platforms, npm install will succeed but hmanlab will print a friendly "no prebuilt binary" message and exit. Build from source via cargo install --git https://github.com/hmanlab/hmanlab.

Where does .hmanlab/ live?

Wherever you launch hmanlab from — that becomes the workspace:

• Project install: npx hmanlab from a project dir → <project>/.hmanlab/
• Global install: cd ~/myrepo && hmanlab → ~/myrepo/.hmanlab/. cd ~ && hmanlab → ~/.hmanlab/

User-scope state (cross-project preferences, identity) always lives at ~/.hmanlab/.

License

MIT. See https://github.com/hmanlab/hmanlab for source.