Chewy

A terminal UI for local AI image generation with Stable Diffusion and FLUX.

Built with the Charm Ruby ecosystem (bubbletea, lipgloss, bubbles) and stable-diffusion.cpp.

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Install

brew install Holy-Coders/chewy/chewy

This installs both chewy and sd (the stable-diffusion.cpp inference engine with Metal GPU acceleration).

Manual install

Requirements: Ruby 4.0+, stable-diffusion.cpp

git clone https://github.com/Holy-Coders/chewy.git
cd chewy
bundle install
ruby chewy.rb

Set SD_BIN to point to your sd binary if it's not on your PATH.

Usage

chewy

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
tab	Cycle focus between prompt, negative prompt, and params
enter	Generate image (when in prompt/negative)
^n	Open model picker
^d	Download models from HuggingFace
^a	Gallery
^g	Generation history
^b	Browse for init image (img2img)
^v	Paste image from clipboard (img2img)
^u	Clear init image
^l	LoRA selection
^p	Presets
^t	Theme picker
^e	Open last image in viewer
^f	Fullscreen image preview
^x	Cancel generation
^r	Randomize seed
^q	Quit

Models

Place .gguf, .safetensors, or .ckpt model files in ~/models (or set CHEWY_MODELS_DIR).

Chewy also scans for models from:

• DiffusionBee (~/.diffusionbee)
• Draw Things (~/Library/Containers/com.liuliu.draw-things/Data/Documents/Models)

Press ^d inside chewy to browse and download models directly from HuggingFace.

FLUX models

FLUX models require companion files (clip_l, t5xxl, vae). Chewy will automatically download these when you first try to generate with a FLUX model. You'll need a HuggingFace token with read access.

img2img

Press ^b to browse for an input image, or ^v to paste from clipboard. Adjust the strength parameter (0.0-1.0) to control how much the output differs from the input. Use ^u to clear and go back to txt2img.

Configuration

Config is stored at ~/.config/sdtui/config.yml. You can also set:

Env var	Description
SD_BIN	Path to the sd binary
CHEWY_MODELS_DIR	Model directory (default: ~/models)
CHEWY_OUTPUT_DIR	Output directory (default: ./outputs)
CHEWY_LORA_DIR	LoRA directory (default: ~/loras)

Contributing

Setup

git clone https://github.com/Holy-Coders/chewy.git
cd chewy
bundle install

You'll need stable-diffusion.cpp built and on your PATH (or set SD_BIN):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp
cd stable-diffusion.cpp
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DSD_METAL=ON    # macOS with Metal GPU
cmake --build . --config Release
cp bin/sd-cli /usr/local/bin/sd

Project structure

This is a single-file app:

• chewy.rb — the entire TUI application
• Gemfile / Gemfile.lock — Ruby dependencies
• VERSION — semver, read at runtime and used by CI for releases
• Formula/ — Homebrew formulas (sd-cpp and chewy)
• logo.jpeg — the logo

Dependencies

Gem	Purpose
bubbletea	Elm Architecture TUI framework
lipgloss	Terminal styling and layout
bubbles	TUI components (list, text input, spinner, progress)
chunky_png	PNG reading for terminal image rendering

Making changes

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b my-feature)
3. Make your changes to chewy.rb
4. Test locally with ruby chewy.rb
5. Open a PR

Releasing

Bump the version in VERSION and push to main. CI will automatically:

1. Create a GitHub release
2. Update the Homebrew formula with the new sha256

License

MIT - Copyright (c) 2026 Holy Coders