Features
🖥️ Full chat interface in your terminal
🤖 Create bots with different personalities and objectives
🧵 Create multiple persistent threads
Marvin includes a full-featured TUI, or text user interface, that runs entirely in your terminal. The TUI makes it easy to chat with your bots, as well as manage them, for quick non-programmatic interactions.
Starting the TUI¶
To start the TUI, type marvin chat into your terminal. You should see this screen:
Avoid terminal.app on MacOS
On MacOS, the default terminal gives a poor TUI experience. You might prefer another terminal, like iTerm2 or Warp. See the Textual FAQ for more detail.
Chatting¶
To chat with a bot, begin typing in the input at the bottom of the screen and hit enter. Your message will appear and Marvin will respond. You’ll notice your converation appears in the left sidebar as a new thread.
Responses are rendered as markdown. Unfortunately, you can’t enter multi-line responses yet, but this is a highly-requested Textual feature.
Copying messages¶
To copy a message, enter the message editing mode by clicking on it. Then click the “Copy” button to copy the message contents to the clipboard.
Deleting messages¶
You can delete messages if you want to restart your conversation from a certain point. Note that deleting a message also deletes all subsequent messages. To delete a message, enter the message editing mode by clicking on it. Then click the “Delete” button.
Threads¶
Each conversation in Marvin is called a “thread”. Threads are persistent and can have potentially many participants (both bot and human). In the TUI, each thread is a distinct history of messages between you and a bot.
Threads are shown in the sidebar on the left side of the screen. You will only see threads that include the bot you’re currently talking to.
Deleting threads¶
To delete a thread, select it from the left hand sidebar and press the “Delete thread” button.
Auto-naming threads¶
Marvin does its best to name the threads, taking the message history into account as well as the bot’s personality. It will update the thread name until the bot has responded more than five times.
Bots¶
Bots are what set Marvin apart from a simple chat interface. Marvin bots all have personalities and instructions, so you can save bots that are particularly useful to you. You might have one bot that only writes formal emails, another that brainstorms engineering solutions, a third that plays role-playing games, and another that only creates memes. It’s comple
