lilbee: I turned my terminal into a local search engine I can talk to, built entirely in Textual

[tobocop2]

I like terminals, and I'm blown away by this project. Textual enabled me to build a full blown terminal-driven Q&A experience with my documents and code, directly in the terminal. I've been using my terminal to talk to horticulture forums, websites, and code, and it's been so much fun. I really am extremely grateful for this project. It's made using my computer a lot more fun for me than I've ever had.

lilbee is a local-first search engine you can talk to, and its entire app is built with Textual. It runs and manages its own local models, indexes your files and code, crawls the websites you point it at into a searchable library, and answers in plain English with a citation to the source file and line. Run lilbee with no args and you get a full-screen Textual app: streaming chat, a model bar with searchable pickers and a Search/Chat toggle, a Task Center where crawls and ingests show live progress, and separate screens for the model catalog, settings, the setup wizard, and an auto-built wiki. Textual keeps the whole thing responsive while a model streams tokens on the same event loop.

One architecture note: inference runs in-process on that same loop today. I'm moving it to a llama-server and llama-swap setup so the same single binary scales from a laptop to multiple GPUs (tobocop2/lilbee#267).

Project Site: https://lilbee.sh
Github: https://github.com/tobocop2/lilbee

The TUI is core to the project.