filechat 0.2.0

A local read-only AI coding assistant

FileChat

FileChat is an AI assistant designed to help users understand and improve their local projects. It allows you to chat about files in your local folder while maintaining full control over your code.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/dd3c6617-b141-47ab-926e-c62abcc7b4a6

Features

• Project Indexing: Creates a searchable index of your project files
• Contextual Chat: Ask questions about your project with AI that understands your codebase
• Real-time Updates: Automatically detects and indexes file changes
• Configurable: Customize which files to index and how to process them
• Chat History: ChatGPT-like chat history for each directory

Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12 or higher
• A Mistral AI API key stored in the MISTRAL_API_KEY environment variable

Option 1: Install the pre-built wheel

You can use any Package management tool you like. Here is an example for pip:

pip install https://github.com/msvana/filechat/releases/download/latest/filechat-0.1.6-py3-none-any.whl

And here is an example of installing FileChat as a UV tool:

uv tool install https://github.com/msvana/filechat/releases/download/latest/filechat-0.1.6-py3-none-any.whl

On Linux, you should also specify the hardware accelerator as an optional dependency. We support cpu, xpu (Intel Arc), and cuda. If you don't specify the accelerator, you'll get a version with CUDA support, which might be unnecessarily large. Here is an example of installing FileChat with xpu support:

PIP:

pip install "filechat[xpu] @ https://github.com/msvana/filechat/releases/download/latest/filechat-0.1.6-py3-none-any.whl"

UV Tool:

uv tool install https://github.com/msvana/filechat/releases/download/latest/filechat-0.1.6-py3-none-any.whl[xpu]

Option 2: Clone the repository and use UV

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/msvana/filechat
cd filechat

2. Install dependencies using uv:

uv sync

3. (Optional) Install GPU support if available:

# CUDA (NVIDIA)
uv sync --extra cuda

# XPU (Intel Arc)
uv sync --extra xpu

Usage

uv run filechat /path/to/your/project

Configuration

On the first run, FileChat creates a configuration file at ~/.config/filechat.json. Feel free to change it as you need. Here is a full example:

{
    "max_file_size_kb": 30,
    "ignored_dirs": [".git", "__pycache__", ".venv", ".pytest_cache", "node_modules"],
    "allowed_suffixes": [".txt", ".json", ".py", ".toml", ".html", ".md", ".js", ".ts", ".vue"],
    "index_store_path": "/home/milos/.cache/filechat",
    "model": "mistral-medium-2508",
    "api_key": "[MISTRAL_API_KEY]"
}

Roadmap

Short term (weeks)

• Add support for other models
• Add tools for browsing the filesystem
• Improve inference for embedding models (switch from sentence-transformers to an ONNX runtime)
• Support CUDA on Windows
• Publish on PyPI

Long term (months)

• Improve file retrieval (for example, via Graph RAG)
• Reimplement file indexing and querying in a compiled language
• Support important binary file types (images, PDFs)
• Add web search tools