Chat in your terminal

Lemonade ships with a built-in chat REPL so you can talk to a local model without leaving the terminal, no browser, no editor integration, no extra dependencies.

lemonade chat

That's it. If no model is loaded, you'll be prompted to pick one. If a model is already loaded server-side, it's used automatically.

Launching

Two equivalent entry points:

# Open the REPL, optionally with a model
lemonade chat
lemonade chat Qwen3-1.7B-Hybrid

# Or piggyback on the existing run command
lemonade run Qwen3-1.7B-Hybrid --chat-cli

lemonade chat is the recommended form. lemonade run --chat-cli exists so muscle memory from other tools still works.

Options

Option	Description
MODEL (positional)	Model to chat with. If omitted, uses the currently loaded model, or prompts you to choose.
--system TEXT	Set a system prompt for the session.
--no-stream	Wait for the full response instead of streaming token-by-token. Useful when piping output.

Using the REPL

Once you're in, the prompt is just >. Anything you type that doesn't start with / is sent as a user message. Streaming output flows back inline.

  ─── Qwen3-1.7B-Hybrid ───────────────────────────────────  ? /help for shortcuts
  Clear line: Esc / Ctrl-U · Stop response or exit: Ctrl-C

  >

Type /help at any time for the full list of slash commands (switching models, toggling multi-line input, viewing stats, listing or unloading models, etc.).

Reasoning models

If the active model emits a thinking trace (Qwen 3, Phi-4-mini-reasoning, DeepSeek-R1, …), the REPL renders it above the answer:

The reasoning trace is display-only, it isn't kept in the chat history sent back on the next turn.

Use /think to control whether the model reasons at all:

Command	Effect
/think	Show the current reasoning mode
/think on	Ask the model to reason
/think off	Suppress the thinking trace (injects /no_think on supported models)
/think default	Stop overriding, let the model do whatever it does by default

Key bindings

Key	Action
Enter	Send the message (in multi-line mode: send when the line is blank)
Esc / Ctrl-U	Clear the current line
Ctrl-C	Stop a streaming response, cancel a multi-line buffer, or exit at an empty prompt
Ctrl-D / Ctrl-Z	Exit (EOF)