Gemini Chat TUI 🤖

gemini-chat-tui is a terminal-based chat interface for interacting with Google's Gemini AI model directly from your terminal. It provides a clean Textual-based user interface with rich output and seamless Gemini API integration.

Contents

Features | Screenshot | Setup & Run | Termux Support | Requirements | License

Features

• Terminal UI (Textual) — Clean, keyboard-driven chat interface for Gemini AI.
• Asynchronous Interaction — Input is disabled while Gemini responds for smooth UX.
• Environment Variable Management — Securely load your API key using .env.
• Lightweight & Fast — No unnecessary dependencies, minimal setup.
• Cross-Platform — Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Screenshot

Example: Gemini Chat TUI in action inside the terminal interface.

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Setup & Run

1. Clone the repository

First, clone this repository and navigate into the project folder:

git clone https://github.com/hatixntsoa/gemini.chat.tui.git

cd gemini.chat.tui

2. Create a Virtual Environment

You can use either Python’s built-in venv or uv to manage your environment.

Option 1: Using Python venv

python -m venv .venv

Option 2: Using uv (recommended for speed)

uv --quiet venv --seed .venv

3. Activate the Virtual Environment

macOS / Linux

source .venv/bin/activate

Windows (Command Prompt)

.venv\Scripts\activate

Windows (PowerShell)

.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

4. Set Up Environment Variables

The application requires a valid Gemini API key — either free or paid — which can be generated through your Google Account on the Google AI Studio API platform.

Once you have your key, create a .env file in the project’s root directory and add it as follows:

echo "GEMINI_API_KEY=your-api-key-here" > .env

5. Install Dependencies

Install all required packages using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

or using uv if installed

uv pip install -r requirements.txt

6. Run the TUI application

python pychatui/main.py

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Termux Support 🚧

Note: A Termux-compatible version will be released soon.

Currently, google-generativeai depends on gRPC (grpcio), which requires native compilation and doesn’t provide prebuilt binaries for ARM64 (used by Termux on Android).

Building grpcio manually would need Rust toolchains and C/C++ build dependencies, but compilation still fails on Termux environments at this time.

Once a working build process or precompiled ARM64 wheels become available, full Termux support will be added.

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Requirements

• Python 3.8+

• Dependencies (automatically installed via pip):

  • python-dotenv>=1.0.0
  • google-generativeai>=0.7.0
  • textual>=0.77.0
  • rich>=13.0.0

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.