TerminalGPT brings a ChatGPT-like chat experience straight into your terminal. Published on GitHub under the MIT license with about 1,022 stars and last updated in 2025, this TypeScript tool is distributed through npm, so it installs in seconds anywhere Node.js runs. It was featured on Product Hunt and remains a popular way for developers to keep an AI assistant one command away without leaving their shell.
Instead of switching to a browser tab, you open your terminal and start chatting with a GPT model in a familiar conversational flow. TerminalGPT connects to the model provider using your own API key, which keeps you in control of usage and cost. The project focuses on doing one thing well: a lightweight, fast chat client that lives where developers already spend their day. Its open-source codebase is small and hackable, so it is also a handy starting point for anyone building their own command-line AI tools or experimenting with chat interfaces in TypeScript.
The project is deliberately small in scope, which is part of its charm: there is no account system, no hosted backend, and no telemetry — the conversation goes from your terminal straight to the model provider you configured. That also makes it a friendly codebase to learn from, showing how streaming chat, conversation state, and a pleasant command-line experience come together in a compact TypeScript project that runs anywhere Node.js does, including macOS, Linux, and Windows.
TerminalGPT is completely free and open source under the MIT license. The only cost is whatever you pay your model provider for API usage with your own key.
Developers and terminal enthusiasts who want quick access to a GPT assistant while coding or administering systems, without context-switching to a browser.