Show HN: Perspt – fast, immersive terminal CLI to chat with AI models

Hi HN,

We built Perspt (short for *Personal Spectrum Pertaining Thoughts*) while learning Rust. It quickly evolved from an experiment into a useful CLI tool to test various AI models and services quickly. We find it useful and thought it will be of some interest in this community.

  What you can do with Perspt:

   • Chat with any model (internally we use genai Crate): supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Cohere, xAI, DeepSeek, Ollama, and more.
   • Streamed markdown responses in a responsive interface—scrollable, crash-safe, with intuitive keybindings (built using Ratatui).
   • Start instantly: Perspt auto-detects your LLM provider based on environment variables—no config or signup required.
   • Export conversations to share later with the /save command.
   • Includes in-depth docs and a “Perspt Book” explaining the UI architecture and Rust patterns.

You can download prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the GitHub releases page.

  export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-…"
  perspt

We are sharing this because writing a real-world app while learning Rust helped us more than tutorials, and hope Perspt can be useful to others.

You can find it here: https://github.com/eonseed/perspt

We’d appreciate any feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports. Thanks for checking it out.

— Vikrant & Ronak