KAIChat

An application that lets you chat with AI language models, either running locally with Ollama or provided by an online AI service.

Overview

KAIChat is a KDE desktop client for large language models. It keeps your conversations in a local database, so chats survive restarts and can be searched, archived, imported and exported.

The AI back-ends themselves are not implemented in this repository: they come from the textautogeneratetext library of ktextaddons, which KAIChat wraps into a regular KXmlGui application. KAIChat adds the main window, the menus and actions, the import/export jobs, the command-line and D-Bus interfaces, a System Settings module and a few plugins.

Features

Conversations

• Several named chats, kept in a local database and restored at startup
• Archive chats you no longer need, and show or hide them (View → Show Archive)
• Full-text search across the stored conversations (Edit → Search in Database…, or Ctrl+F)
• Quick Ask: a small standalone dialog to ask a single question without opening the main window. Available from Tools → Open Quick Ask…, with the Meta+Space global shortcut, or with kaichat --quick-ask
• File attachments and model tools can be passed to a question

AI back-ends ("instances")

An instance is one configured connection to a model provider. You can define several of them and switch between them. The available providers depend on the plugins shipped by ktextaddons, and currently include:

• Local: Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio
• Hosted: Ollama Cloud / Ollama Online, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic, Mistral AI, Groq Cloud, Grok (X.ai), Qwen (DashScope), OpenRouter, DeepInfra, Novita AI, Cerebras, Kluster AI, Venice, Kimi (Moonshot AI), Sarvam AI, CompactifAI, AtlasCloud, and other OpenAI-compatible endpoints

Run kaichat --plugin-info to list the back-ends and tools actually available in your build, and kaichat --list-instances to list the instances you configured.

Import and export

• Export the current chat as JSON (*.kaichat), Markdown, plain text or PDF (File → Export…)
• Import a chat from JSON (File → Import…, kaichat --import <file>, or by passing the file as an argument — *.kaichat files are registered under the application/vnd.kde.kaichat MIME type)

Extensibility

• MCP servers: connect the model to Model Context Protocol servers (optional, see USE_MCP_SERVER_SUPPORT below)
• Tool plugins, which the model can call. This repository ships a current date and time tool; more live in kaichat-addons
• Text plugins, which act on the text of a message. This repository ships a web-shortcut lookup plugin and, when Purpose is available, a "share text" plugin

Desktop integration

• System Settings module (kcm_autogeneratetext) to configure instances and MCP servers outside the application
• Optional system tray icon, and notifications when a model download finishes
• Single-instance behaviour, via D-Bus or KDSingleApplication
• D-Bus interface org.kde.kaichat.Application (see below)
• Spell checking (Sonnet), optional text-to-speech, color-scheme switching, full screen (F11), hideable menu bar with a hamburger menu
• Increase or decrease the global font size with Ctrl++ and Ctrl+-

Command-line options

Option	Description
--list-instances	Print the configured instances and exit
--list-chats	Print the stored chat titles and exit
--plugin-info	Print the available text and tool plugins and exit
--instance <name>	Start with a specific instance
--new-chat <title>	Create a new chat
--switch-to-chat <name>	Switch to an existing chat by title
--switch-to-chat-from-id <id>	Switch to an existing chat by identifier
--ask-message <message>	Ask a question straight away
--attach <url>	Attach a file to the question (repeatable)
--tool <name>	Enable a tool for the question (repeatable)
--quick-ask	Open the Quick Ask dialog and exit
--import <file>	Import a chat from a JSON file
--start-ollama	Start the local Ollama program
--debug	Enable debug mode and show the hidden Debug menu
--feedback	List available user-feedback sources (with KUserFeedback)
[file…]	Chat files to import

Because KAIChat is a single-instance application, running it again with options forwards them to the running instance.

D-Bus interface

When built with D-Bus support, the running application exports org.kde.kaichat.Application on the org.kde.kaichat service:

IFACE=org.kde.kaichat.Application
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.chatsList
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.createNewChat "My chat"
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.switchToChat "My chat"
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.switchToChatId "<id>"
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.showArchived true
qdbus org.kde.kaichat /Application $IFACE.ask "Hello"

Files

Path	Contents
~/.config/kaichatrc	Application settings
~/.local/share/kaichat/ai-database/	Chats and messages databases

API keys for hosted services are stored by ktextaddons with the rest of the instance configuration; treat those files as secrets.

Source Code

You can get KAIChat from:

• https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kaichat
• https://github.com/KDE/kaichat (mirror)

git clone https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kaichat.git
# or, over SSH
git clone git@invent.kde.org:utilities/kaichat.git

Extra plugins can be found in the kaichat-addons repository:

git clone https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kaichat-addons.git

Requirements

• cmake 3.29 or later and extra-cmake-modules 6.26 or later
• Qt 6.10 or later: Widgets, Sql
• KDE Frameworks 6.26 or later: kcoreaddons, kconfig, ki18n, kwidgetsaddons, kxmlgui, kiconthemes, kcrash, kwindowsystem, knotifyconfig, knotifications, kcmutils, syntax-highlighting, kglobalaccel, kio, sonnet, kstatusnotifieritem
• ktextaddons 2.1.44 or later, with the TextAutoGenerateText, TextAutoGenerateTextMcpProtocolWidgets, TextAddonsWidgets and TextCustomEditor components
• shared-mime-info 1.10 or later

Optional: kdbusaddons (or KDSingleApplication when D-Bus support is disabled), purpose, kuserfeedback, kdoctools, ktextaddons' TextEditTextToSpeech.

kglobalaccel is not used on Windows, macOS and Haiku, and purpose is not used on macOS.

How to build KAIChat

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

Or using the CMake presets (requires CMake 3.20 or later):

cmake --preset dev && cmake --build --preset dev

Using the mold linker:

cmake --preset dev-mold && cmake --build --preset dev-mold

Other presets are defined in CMakePresets.json: release, asan, clazy, coverage, dev-clang, unity, profile, ftime-trace and check-cmake.

Build options

Option	Default	Description
USE_DBUS	Unix, not macOS	Build the D-Bus service and adaptor
USE_MCP_SERVER_SUPPORT	ON	MCP server support (experimental)
USE_MOLD_LINKER	ON	Use the mold linker when it is found
USE_UNITY_CMAKE_SUPPORT	OFF	Unity build, to speed up compilation
WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS	OFF	Build with -Werror (/WX on MSVC)
BUILD_TESTING	ON (from ECM)	Build the autotests

When USE_DBUS is off, KDSingleApplication is used instead to keep the application a single instance.

Run the tests with ctest from the build directory.

ASAN

The sanitizers.supp file can be used to suppress known reports, for example:

LSAN_OPTIONS=suppressions=../sanitizers.supp ./bin/kaichat

Unity

KAIChat can be built with CMake unity build support:

cmake --preset unity && cmake --build --preset unity

Build-time analysis

See readme-build-ftime.txt for measuring compilation time with ClangBuildAnalyzer and the ftime-trace preset.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. We use https://invent.kde.org/.

Source formatting is enforced by clang-format through a pre-commit hook; see README-pre-commit.md for how to install it. Release steps are described in README-RELEASE.md.

The KDE Community Code of Conduct applies.

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later. More information can be found in the LICENSES folder.

Maintainer

• Laurent Montel montel@kde.org