What is oterm?
Interact directly with your local Ollama AI models without ever leaving the command line. If you work frequently in the terminal and use Ollama, oterm provides a streamlined, feature-rich interface designed to enhance your workflow. Forget juggling separate web UIs or basic command prompts; oterm brings sophisticated AI interaction right into your familiar terminal environment.
It simplifies managing multiple models, customizing their behavior, and keeping track of your conversations, all through an intuitive text-based user interface (TUI).
Key Features
⌨️ Direct Terminal UI: Launch and interact with Ollama models instantly within your terminal. No need to manage separate servers or frontends – just type
oterm.💻 Cross-Platform Compatibility: Run oterm seamlessly on Linux, macOS, and Windows, supporting most standard terminal emulators.
💾 Persistent Chat Sessions: Maintain multiple, distinct chat sessions. Your conversation history, system prompts, and parameter settings for each session are saved locally in a SQLite database for easy recall.
🤖 Flexible Model Usage: Select and switch between any models available in your Ollama instance, including your own custom-built models.
⚙️ Deep Customization: Easily modify system prompts and adjust model parameters (like temperature or top-k) directly within the interface to fine-tune AI responses for specific tasks.
🔌 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support: Integrate external tools and data sources using MCP. Connect oterm to custom servers (via SSE or WebSocket) to provide real-time, context-specific information to the model (e.g., access local files, databases, or APIs).
🖼️ Terminal Image Display: Include images in your prompts directly from the terminal, with support for Sixel graphics rendering in compatible emulators.
✨ Customizable Appearance: Personalize the look and feel of the interface with multiple built-in themes.
🛠️ Built-in Debugging: Access an in-app log viewer to help troubleshoot issues or understand model interactions more deeply.
🚀 Custom Commands: Define your own reusable commands within oterm. Each command can launch a pre-configured chat session with specific models, prompts, and connected tools for recurring tasks.
Use Cases
See how oterm fits into practical workflows:
Code Generation & Assistance: As a developer, you're working on a script in your terminal editor. You need a quick code snippet or explanation. Instead of switching windows, you open a new terminal tab, launch
oterm, select your preferred coding model (like CodeLlama), and ask your question. You get the answer directly in the terminal, copy it, and continue coding with minimal disruption. You save this session with a specific system prompt optimized for Python development.Experimenting with Prompts: You're exploring the capabilities of a new multimodal model you've pulled with Ollama. Using oterm, you start multiple chat sessions. In one, you test its descriptive abilities with images using the Sixel support. In another, you tweak the system prompt and temperature parameters to see how it affects creative writing output. Each session is saved, allowing you to easily compare results later.
Context-Aware Information Retrieval: You need to query information from your company's internal knowledge base or a specific Git repository. You set up a simple MCP server that accesses this data. Within oterm, you connect to this tool. Now, you can ask the AI model questions like "Summarize the recent changes in the 'main' branch of project X" or "What are the key points from the Q3 strategy document?", and the model retrieves the relevant context through the MCP tool before generating its response.
Conclusion
oterm offers a focused and efficient way to interact with Ollama AI models directly within your terminal. It combines the immediacy of the command line with features like persistent sessions, deep customization, tool integration via MCP, and image support. If you value control, efficiency, and prefer staying within your terminal environment, oterm provides a robust and user-friendly client for leveraging your local AI models.
More information on oterm
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oterm was manually vetted by our editorial team and was first featured on 2025-05-04.
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