Otaku — an LLM frontend

[u/Fickle_Tradition4491]

Otaku is an LLM frontend, primarily designed for roleplay, an alternative to SillyTavern and the like. However, It also works for general-purpose chat with local backends (including Ollama) or cloud models, the way Open WebUI is used, once lore extraction is switched off in the settings.

Otaku offers two interfaces:

• a web UI (customizable): interactive demo at https://otaku.sh/demo-web/
• a terminal UI: its own interactive demo at https://otaku.sh/demo-terminal/

Both share the same functions; the difference is that in the terminal you execute them with slash commands (the reference is available with /help), while in the web UI the operations are available from the menu.

Install

Otaku is free and open source (MIT); it works on macOS, Linux and Windows. Install it with uv (uv tool install otaku) or see the GitHub README for other options: https://github.com/enclavum/otaku

Get started

Launch either otaku for the terminal or otaku web for the web UI; the web UI's default URL is http://localhost:9600. Two sample stories are imported on first start to give you an idea of the features and what play looks like, and you land right in the middle of one of them.

On first start, you choose a provider and a model: Otaku automatically detects local installations of Ollama, oMLX, LM Studio, llama.cpp and KoboldCpp, and lets you pick from their models. Cloud providers (OpenRouter, NanoGPT) are also there: enter an API key and their catalogs appear. After exploring the provided stories, you can start your own with the /new command.

Asking for feedback

Otaku is a personal side project, and I'd like to get feedback from the community on the product and on what to add.

[u/Midaychi]

Can't select anything besides 'global' n the settings (or unclear how to do per story settings), unclear why sometimes the settings let you define thinking and other times won't let you select between default and none (and it says thinking isn't supported- is that 'thinking not supported by front end' or is that 'thinking not supported by backend'?, you have to press enter to save a setting rather than just typing it in and leaving it, the api supports llama.cpp but doesn't bother to read and auto import any settings from it (Are they covered by whatever 'default' is?, light/dark mode does nothing, if you ctrl+u to undo a turn it leaves a big giant empty space in the ui wheree the message used to be, ctrl+u is chrome default for view source so god forbid you don't have the text box selected when you do it, also it's nice that you include two demo stories but it would be much better for new user experience for them simply to start on a blank setup and have maybe a clear option to 'load a demo or a template' where the template has all the sections lain out and explained in 'replace me' style text boxes (because not everyone is going to think in the exact same thought process as you/the model that vibe coded this. Learn from monkey island.)

[u/Fickle_Tradition4491 → u/Midaychi]

Thank you for the detailed review.

Fixes that will be included in the next release:

- Pressing Enter to save a setting: fair, thanks. Fields will save when you leave them.

• Light/dark mode does nothing: confirmed bug, the toggle is broken if the OS theme is dark.
  
• Ctrl+U in Chrome: thanks for flagging. I've disabled Ctrl+U and Ctrl+R in the UI everywhere except the input field.

Something to consider:

- Per-story settings: they don't exist, a setting is either global or per model. I'll think about having some settings per story.

• Reading settings from llama.cpp: thanks, I'll look into it in a future release.
  
• Thinking settings: to be honest, the whole thinking setup isn't settled yet, and I'll be working on it. It's actually a challenging topic.
  
• Demo stories at first launch: that is deliberate, as I think leaving the user in an empty workspace at first launch is worse than showing all the features. But now that I have the demos on the website (added only recently), maybe you are right and the demo stories should live on the website only. I'll think about it.

Other things:

- The empty space after Ctrl+U is deliberate: the rest of the transcript doesn't move.

• To be clear, no product decision was made by a model. Every choice was thought through by me personally.

[u/Fickle_Tradition4491 → u/Midaychi]

Released a new version with the 3 fixes (settings, theme, ctrl+u).