ellie

An ollie front-end, via ollie-9p, for our emacs friends. Provides a chat buffer, prompt composition, interrupt handling, and session management. The agent core, backends, and tools are handled by the ollie-9p server.

Background

s/sh proved that a full interactive client could be built on top of the ollie-9p filesystem using nothing but plain file I/O. ellie asks the same question in a different environment: can the same interface be built as an Emacs package, with no knowledge of ollie's internals and no dependencies beyond Emacs itself?

The answer is yes. The implementation uses only built-in Emacs file operations: write-region to submit prompts, a half-second timer to tail the chat log by comparing file sizes, and insert-file-contents to read new content into a buffer. The ollie-9p filesystem is the entire API surface.

Prerequisites

olliesrv must be running and mounted before use:

olliesrv

By default the server mounts at ~/mnt/ollie. Set OLLIE to use a different path.

Installation

Add ellie.el to your load path:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ellie")
(require 'ellie)

Or with use-package:

(use-package ellie
  :load-path "/path/to/ellie")

Optionally set a mount path and default session options:

(setq ollie-mount-directory "/custom/mount")
(setq ollie-default-session-opts '(("backend" . "ollama") ("model" . "qwen3:8b")))

Usage

Command	Description
M-x ellie	Open chat; attach to last session for default-directory, or create a new one
M-x ellie-new-and-open	Force-create a new session and open chat
M-x ellie-attach-and-open	Attach to an existing session by ID

UI

In the *ellie* buffer:

Key	Action
RET	Open input window and compose a prompt
C-c C-q	Open input window and compose a queued prompt
C-c C-c	Interrupt the running turn
C-c C-k	Kill the current session
C-c C-r	Rename the current session
C-c C-n / n	New session
C-c C-a	Attach to a different session
C-c C-d	Open the ollie mount in Dired
C-c C-p	Show the rendered system prompt
g	Force-refresh the chat log

In the *ellie-input* window:

Key	Action
C-c C-c	Submit
C-c C-k	Cancel

The input window accepts multi-line prompts. Queued prompts are held until the current turn finishes.

The mode line shows the active session ID and current state (idle or the running state name).

Code Completion

ellie-complete provides ghost-text code completion via the /complete endpoint on ollie-9p (using 9p rdwr on the namespace). Press M-/ to request a completion at point; the result appears as gray italic ghost text.

Key	Action
M-/	Request completion at point (or for selected region)
TAB / RET	Accept the suggestion
Any other key	Dismiss
M-/ (while ghost visible)	Request a new completion (retries preserve region)

With an active region, the completion replaces the selected text. Without a region, it inserts at point.

Configuration

Variable	Env var	Description
ellie-complete-backend	OLLIE_COMPLETE_BACKEND	Backend for completion (required)
ellie-complete-model	OLLIE_COMPLETE_MODEL	Model for completion (required)
ellie-complete-prefix-max	—	Max chars of context before point (default: 4000)
ellie-complete-suffix-max	—	Max chars of context after point (default: 1000)

Example:

(setq ellie-complete-backend "ollama")
(setq ellie-complete-model "qwen3:4b")

Or via environment / ~/.config/ollie/env:

OLLIE_COMPLETE_BACKEND=ollama
OLLIE_COMPLETE_MODEL=qwen3:4b

License

GPLv3