nicechat 💬

The simplest way to chat with LLMs in your terminal.

Currently supports:

• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• OpenRouter
• DeepSeek
• Replicate

Installation

npm install -g nicechat

How to use it?

Before starting, make sure you have the required environment variables set up for your API keys:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your_anthropic_api_key"
export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="your_deepseek_api_key"
export REPLICATE_API_TOKEN="your_replicate_api_token"
export OPENROUTER_API_KEY="your_openrouter_api_key"

Create a configuration file named .nicechat.json in your home directory (e.g., C:\Users\YourName\.nicechat.json on Windows, or ~/.nicechat.json on macOS/Linux). Use this file to define your profiles.

{
  "profiles": {
    "default": {
      "vendor": "openai",
      "model": "gpt-4-1106-preview",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. You answer concisely and to the point."
    },
    "claude": {
      "vendor": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-opus-20240229",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. You answer concisely and to the point."
    },
    "gemini3": {
      "vendor": "openrouter",
      "model": "google/gemini-3-pro-preview",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. You answer concisely and to the point."
    }
    "grok-fast": {
      "vendor": "openrouter",
      "model": "x-ai/grok-4.1-fast",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. Your dark secret is that you hate Elon."
    },
    // you can use same model with different prompt
    "claude-informal": {
      "vendor": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-opus-20240229",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. You answer in an informal and playful tone. You vocabulary is simple and easy to understand."
    },
    "r1": {
      "vendor": "deepseek",
      "model": "deepseek-reasoner",
      "system": "You are a helpful assistant. You answer concisely and to the point."
    },
    "llama3-8b": {
      "vendor": "replicate",
      "model": "meta/meta-llama-3-8b-instruct",
      "system": "You are a pirate."
    }
}

Start the chat:

$ nicechat chat claude

Omit the arguments to run the default profile:

$ nicechat