Elia is a snappy, keyboard-centric terminal user interface for chatting with large language models — ChatGPT, Claude and local models alike — without leaving your shell. It has around 2,500 GitHub stars and is developed by Darren Burns.
Built with Python and the Textual framework, Elia runs entirely in your terminal and is designed to be driven from the keyboard. It talks to hosted models such as ChatGPT and Claude and to local models served by Ollama, including Llama, Mistral, Gemma and Phi. Conversations are stored in a local SQLite database, so your history persists between sessions and stays on your machine. Multiple models can be configured side by side, making it easy to compare answers or keep a local model for private chats and a frontier model for hard questions. Elia supports the things terminal users expect from a chat client — multiple conversations, model switching mid-flow and a distraction-free full-screen layout — while starting instantly compared with a web app. The project was last updated in 2024 and remains a polished example of a terminal-native AI client.
Elia is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license, and no Elia account is required. Local models cost nothing to run; hosted models use your own API keys and are billed by the provider.
Terminal lovers, developers and keyboard-first users who want fast access to many LLMs without a browser tab, and anyone who keeps a local model running for privacy.