pure-chat 0.2.1

A high-performance Terminal User Interface (TUI) designed to replicate the experience of browser based llm chat applications directly in your terminal.

PureChat

A high-performance Terminal User Interface (TUI) designed to replicate the experience of browser based llm chat applications directly in your terminal. This tool provides persistent conversation memory, real-time streaming, and interactive session management.

💡 Motivation

Most modern AI CLI tools have become heavily "agentic." While powerful for automation, they often force massive context windows, auto-execute commands, and prioritize task completion over simple conversation. This results in high token consumption, slower response times, and a lack of control over what data is being sent.

Gemini CLI Vault was built to fill the gap for a "regular" chat app in the terminal. It provides a familiar web-like experience for discussing complicated topics in a controlled environment where you don't want the tool to send excessive context or execute commands autonomously.

✨ Key Features

• Persistent Memory: Conversations are stored in a local SQLite database (gemini_vault.db), allowing you to resume any chat session at any time.
• Live Streaming & Markdown: Responses stream in real-time with full Markdown rendering, including syntax-highlighted code blocks, tables, and lists.
• Intelligent Context Window: Automatically manages token usage using a sliding window of the last 12 messages to maintain context without exceeding limits.
• Interactive Session Switcher: Use the /conversations command to browse, search, and switch between previous chat sessions using an arrow-key menu.
• Global Command History: Navigate your previous prompts across all sessions using the UP and DOWN arrows (powered by prompt_toolkit).
• Google Search Integration: The assistant is equipped with the Google Search tool to provide up-to-date information on current events.
• Dynamic Personalities: Load custom system instructions from a GEMINI.md file to change the AI's behavior and tone.

🛠️ Installation (using uv)

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/gemini-cli-vault.git
cd gemini-cli-vault

2. Configure Environment Variables:

# Create a .env file in the project root:
GEMINI_API_KEY=your_google_api_key_here
GEMINI_MODEL=gemini-3-flash-preview

3. (Optional) Define System Instructions: Create a GEMINI.md file to set the AI's System Prompt: You are an expert software architect. Provide concise, high-level advice and always include code snippets in Python or Rust.

🚀 Usage

Start a new or default session:

uv run main.py

Start or resume a specific session by name:

python main.py --name Project-Alpha

⌨️ In-Chat Commands

• /conversations : Opens the interactive session manager to switch or create chats.
• /exit : Safely saves and exits the application.
• UP / DOWN : Cycle through your entire history of user prompts.
• Ctrl+C : Interrupt the current input line.

🏗️ Project Architecture

• main.py: The entry point and TUI controller. Handles the input loop and rich live display.
• db_manager.py: The data layer. Manages SQLite tables, message logging, and session retrieval.
• ai_manager.py: The AI integration layer. Configures the google-genai client, tools, and system instructions.
• gemini_vault.db: The local database generated on first run.

🤖 AI Disclosure

This project was primarily developed with the assistance of AI. While the core logic, architecture, and feature set were human-directed, the majority of the code implementation and boilerplate was generated and refined using Large Language Models.