ChatGPT in your terminal, with actual manners

What it does

j178/chatgpt is an interactive terminal client for OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models. It runs as a persistent chat session with history, context management, and readline-style navigation — or as a one-shot pipe for shell scripting. Think of it as a TUI that happens to talk to an API.

The interesting bit

The project treats the CLI as a real interface, not a thin wrapper around curl. It stores conversation history in JSON, supports multi-line input with Emacs-style keybindings, and lets you hot-swap between predefined prompts (e.g., a translator persona) without restarting. The Azure OpenAI support is baked in, not bolted on.

Key highlights

• Persistent conversation history with indexed navigation (ctrl+p/ctrl+n for messages, ctrl+g/ctrl+o for conversations)
• Predefined prompt system via config file, switchable at runtime with -p
• Full pipe support: cat file | chatgpt -p 'summarize this' works as expected
• Customizable keybindings through JSON config (not just env vars)
• Multi-line input mode with ctrl+j toggle, avoiding the “how do I type a newline” trap

Caveats

• Multi-provider support (Claude, Gemini, Ollama) is promised but not yet shipped; the README flags this as in-development
• Default config lives in ~/.config/chatgpt/config.json — no XDG fallback mentioned for Windows
• The “unexpected EOF” error message suggests checking your API key, which is a bit of a shrug

Verdict

Worth a look if you spend more time in tmux than in browser tabs and want ChatGPT without the context-switching tax. Skip it if you need local models today or want a GUI.