A minimalist local LLM terminal chat interface using Ollama, native streaming, and JSONL memory.

Yak at your local model. Fully offline. Edit or delete your chat history(s).

Features

• 🧠 Runs on any Ollama-compatible model (gemma3, llama3, mistral, etc)
• 🧵 Offline, Real-time streaming replies in the terminal
• 📜 Memory stored in lightweight jsonl files on your machine

Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• Ollama installed and running

Installation

npm install -g yak-llm

Start

yak start

Start chatting

🦧> What's a good name for a chat app?
🤖: How about "Yak"? It's short, and yaks are fluffy like llamas!

If you have Ollama downloaded and running, Yak will automatically download a model if none is found. Yak will also create a new default chat session for your first session.

Stop chatting with command or ctrl+c

🦧> /bye

Usage

🚀 Main Commands
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  yak start            Start chat session with your model
  yak help             Show this help message
  yak list             List all chat sessions
  yak models           List available models


💬 Chat Management
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  yak new <name>       Create new chat session
  yak switch <name>    Switch to chat session
  yak delete <name>    Delete chat session
  yak --reset          Clear current chat history


🤖 Model Management
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  yak model <name>     Switch to different model
  yak models           List downloaded models


💬 In-Chat Commands
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  /bye or /quit        Exit chat session
  http or www          Chat will detect given URLs and crawl them

Models

You can see your downloaded Ollama models by running:

yak models

You can change the model with the CLI command

yak model <model-name>

or in the config.json file manually.

{
  "model": "gemma3:1b",
}

If you want more models, download them from Ollama! 🦙

History

Don't like your chat? All messages are logged to .yak/chats.

You can remove lines from file, or delete the entire log:

yak delete <name-of-chat-file>