lmc

A CLI tool for LLM chats with terminal native streaming.

Features

• Streaming markdown rendering — incremental rendering with syntax highlighting
• Conversation persistence — chat history saved to JSON
• Model configuration — persist model preferences to JSON
• Reasoning display — thinking tokens rendered in style on stderr
• Usage stats — input/output tokens and tokens/sec rate after each response
• TTY-aware — automatically disables markdown rendering when output is piped
• Text-to-speech — ttsc sub-command for streaming TTS via Kokoro model

Requirements

• pnpm v11+
• Node.js v22+
• uv — only for ttsc (text-to-speech)

Installation

# Bundle and install locally
pnpm build
pnpm add --global .

# Build a single-file exe
pnpm build:bin
cp dist/lmc dist/ttsc /somewhere/bin/

# For ttsc only
cp -r tts ~/.ttsc

Package to come later

Usage

Chat (lmc)

lmc [options] <prompt...>

Flag	Short	Type	Description
--new	-n	boolean	Start a new conversation (clear history)
--model	-m	string	Set model name for this session
--config	-c	boolean	Initialize a new config file (~/.lmc_config.json)
--plain	—	boolean	Disable markdown rendering for both stdout and stderr
--plainOut	—	boolean	Disable markdown rendering for stdout only
--plainErr	—	boolean	Disable markdown rendering for stderr only

Examples:

lmc --config                                 # Initialize/edit config
lmc --new "Introduce yourself."              # New conversation
lmc "What is TypeScript?"                    # Continue most recent chat
lmc -m llama3 "Explain quantum computing"    # Chat with specific model on-the-fly
lmc --plain "Plain text output"              # No markdown rendering

Text-to-Speech (ttsc)

echo "text" | ttsc [options]

Flag	Short	Type	Description
--wait	-w	boolean	Wait for all processing before exiting (don't auto-play)
--url	-u	boolean	Fetch text from a URL instead of stdin
--edit	-e	boolean	Edit the input with your $EDITOR before processing

Examples:

echo "Hello, world!" | ttsc
echo "Read this aloud" | ttsc --wait
echo "https://example.com" | ttsc --url

Requires: uv

Wants:

• mpv for playback
• sox for wav merging with --wait

Development

pnpm run dev      # dev run
pnpm run check    # biome lint + format + organize imports

Architecture

index.ts                — LMC entry point, orchestration
tts.ts                  — TTSC entry point, orchestration
src/render/index.ts     — Renderer class: streams LLM response, buffers markdown
src/render/markdown.ts  — renderMarkdown(): syntax-highlighted markdown via Marked + Shiki
src/conversation/       — Conversation persistence
src/config/             — App config persistence
tts/                    — TTS python stub (Kokoro pipeline)
out/                    — Bundled output (index.js, tts.js)

Configuration

• Conversation history: ~/.lmc_convo.json
• Model config: ~/.lmc_config.json
• TTS files: ~/.ttsc/

Dependencies

Package	Purpose
ai (Vercel AI SDK)	Streaming text/usage
@clack/prompts	Interactive prompts and spinner
@cliffy/table	ASCII table rendering
@mozilla/readability	HTML-to-text extraction (ttsc)
chalk	Terminal string styling
happy-dom	DOM parsing for URLs (ttsc)
shiki	Syntax highlighting
terminal-link	Clickable terminal hyperlinks
marked	Markdown parsing