The chat window

The chat window is the heart of Ekorbia. This page covers what every part of it does.

Layout

The composer in detail

Left to right, the composer has:

1. Paperclip (📎) — attach an individual file (.txt, .md, .pdf, or an image). See Attaching files.
2. Folder icon (📁) — attach a whole folder. See Attaching folders.
3. Prompt-attach button (📋) — attach a system prompt from your library to this chat. See Prompts library.
4. Textarea — what you type. Multi-line, expands as you type. Enter sends, Shift+Enter inserts a newline.
5. Model picker — shows the active model’s name. Click to see every installed model and switch mid-conversation.
6. Send button — turns into a Stop button while a reply is streaming.

Attached files, folders, and prompts appear as chips above the textarea. Click the × on any chip to detach it.

Private chats hide the attachment buttons. Because attachments would normally persist to disk, private/ephemeral chats hide the paperclip and folder icons entirely. See Private chats.

Tabs

Every tab is independent: it has its own message history, model selection, attachments, and tool-call output directory. Switching tabs is instant — they’re all kept in memory.

Tabs with attached files show a small paperclip plus a count in the tab strip, so you can see at a glance which conversations have context loaded.

Model picker

Clicking the model name opens a dropdown listing every model currently installed in Ollama (queried live each time the picker opens, so a freshly-pulled model appears immediately).

The picker shows:

• The model’s name
• Any capability badges — TOOL for tool-capable models, VISION for vision-capable models

Your selection sticks across launches. If the model you previously picked has been removed, Ekorbia silently falls back to the first available one.

The quick-query overlay keeps a separate model preference, so you can have a heavy model in the main window for in-depth chats and a small fast model in the overlay for quick lookups.

Status bar

The bottom strip tells you what’s happening with the underlying systems:

• Ollama not running — start Ollama (Ekorbia will offer to do it for you)
• Model not pulled — the active model isn’t installed; pull it with ollama pull <name> or pick a different one
• Cold / Warming / Loaded — Ollama load state of the active model
• Indexing docs/ — 42/87 — appears when any attachment is currently being chunked and embedded; aggregates across all in-flight indexing jobs

The status bar can be hidden in Settings → General.

Related pages

• Streaming and the Stop button
• Edit and retry messages
• Markdown and code blocks
• Exporting chats