hChat

hChat was born out of necessity for literally no one but myself, and really, not even necessity.

why?

Local models continue to get better and better and can run on more and more hardware. I run ollama on nearly all my machines.

There are a ton of really good open source chat clients for local models. Shit, even Ollama ships with it’s on UI for chatting. But, I wanted my own. For no other reason than I wanted on. So, I built hChat with Claude.

It serves no other purpose than being a performance focused chat client for myself.

design decisions

I did some initial research and found egui which is a pure Rust gui framework with zero system dependencies beyond a GPU driver. It also runs well on both Arch & macOS (my two OS’s) without any additional compilation.

Persistence is done witih sqlite via rusqlite. Again, no system dependencies.

Kept it as simple as possible with a single chat pane (i.e. no multi-panel shit) for speed. Went with only Apple silicon for macOS because that’s what I use.

on 2026-04-09 I added in support for openrouter. Most of my agentic coding experience has been nearly entirely with Claude Code and Claude Opus. So, I gave myself the ability to use openrouter to be able to use different models for different things, especially as they start to have their own strengths and weaknesses.

future

Nothing planned really. Just as I use it more, I’ll probably add some features here and there, and when I do that, I’ll keep things updated here. I think the first big thing I want to do is to bundle things up and at least get it distributed via homebrew.