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ellie — Emacs front-end for ollie

ellie talks to an ollie session through the ollie-9p CLI tool, which speaks the 9P protocol directly over a Unix socket. No FUSE mount required. The ollie-9p filesystem is the entire API surface — ellie uses nothing but plain file I/O.

Prerequisites

olliesrv must be running:

olliesrv

Installation

Add ellie.el to your load path:

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

Or with use-package:

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

Optionally set default session options:

(setq ellie-default-session-opts '(("backend" . "ollama") ("model" . "qwen3:8b")))

Quick start

M-x ellie

Opens the session tree (*ellie-sessions*), attached to the last-known session for your working directory if it still exists.

Session tree

The tree shows all sessions organized by active/inactive state:

▼ Active
  ▼ myproject (2)
    default [idle]
    reviewer [idle]
  ▼ scratch (1)
    0 [calling: file_read]
▶ Inactive

Key	Action
`RET`	Expand/collapse header or session; select agent
`e`	Toggle expand/collapse
`n`	New session
`N`	New agent (prompts for profile, cwd)
`c`	Open chat buffer for selected agent
`g`	Refresh tree
`C-c C-c`	Send prompt to selected agent
`C-c C-q`	Queue prompt for selected agent
`C-c C-s`	Stop running agent
`C-c C-k`	Kill session or agent at point
`C-c C-p`	Show system prompt
`q`	Quit tree

Sessions are addressed by name (session/{sname}). Agents within a session are addressed by their auto-generated ID (session/{sname}/agent/{aname}). The tree discovers both automatically.

Chat buffer

Once an agent is selected, c opens the chat buffer (*ellie*):

Key	Action
`RET` / `SPC`	Open input window to compose a prompt
`C-c C-q`	Open input window to compose a queued prompt
`C-c C-c`	Interrupt the running turn
`C-c C-s`	Stop agent
`C-c C-k`	Kill the current session
`C-c C-n` / `n`	New session
`C-c C-a`	Attach to a different session
`C-c C-p`	Show the rendered system prompt
`g`	Force-refresh the chat log
`q`	Close chat (stop stream, bury buffer)

The input window (*ellie-input*):

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

Queued prompts are held until the current turn finishes. The mode line shows ellie:session/agent and the current state.

Creating sessions and agents

Sessions are created by writing key=value pairs to session/new. The ellie-new-session command does this for you, injecting cwd from default-directory.

Agents are created by writing to session/{sname}/agent/new. The ellie-new-agent command prompts for an agent profile and working directory.

You can also create sessions and agents directly from dired — navigate to session/ (or use C-c C-d if you have a mount), open new, write key=value lines, and save.

Architecture

The chat log is append-only. ellie polls it on a half-second timer, comparing file sizes. New content is appended to the buffer and ANSI color codes are rendered. State is read from session/{sname}/agent/{aname}/state.

Everything goes through ollie-9p — there is no emacs-specific daemon, no IPC protocol, no external processes beyond the CLI tool.

Reference

README: /README.md
Usage guide: /doc/usage.md
Technical whitepaper: /doc/whitepaper.md

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