tui-chat

TUI Chat Terminal

A retro-style terminal chat application written in Go, powered by Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss.

Inspired heavily by cool-retro-term

Features

• Multi‑tab chat interface with a sidebar for navigation
• Vim‑style Normal/Insert modes
• In‑memory clipboard with yy (yank) and p (paste) operations
• Optional OS‑clipboard seeding (via golang.design/x/clipboard) at startup
• Retro green‑on‑black color scheme with lipgloss styling
• Automatic scrolling of chat pane when content overflows
• Blinking cursor and “AI thinking” animation
• Cross‑platform (macOS, Linux, Windows) with no external binary dependencies

Requirements

• Go 1.24 or later
• A terminal supporting ANSI escape codes

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Billy-Davies-2/tui-chat.git
   cd tui-chat
   

2. Fetch dependencies

   go mod tidy
   

3. Build

   go build -o tui-chat main.go
   

Usage

Run the built binary:

./tui-chat

Keybindings

Normal Mode

Insert Mode

Roadmap

• Flesh out chat client and AI endpoints.
• mouse support
• mouse support in chat terminal
• more complex vim bindings.
• parallax or some sort of cool backgrounds.

Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to fork the project and submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.