Zlite

简体中文 | English

Zlite is a lightweight CLI AI agent — small footprint, low memory usage. It's great for everyday conversations and light coding, and can also act as the agent brain for server software, letting you operate and manage services like nginx directly through natural language.

Features

• Lightweight: single-file binary, <12MB in size and ≈20MB memory usage, ready to use after download
• Cross-platform: supports Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Multi-model support: works with any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible model; configure multiple providers and switch anytime
• TUI interface: full-featured terminal UI with keyboard shortcuts and plan / build mode switching
• Built-in tools: read files, search, write / edit / delete files, run shell commands, fetch web pages, and search the web — all out of the box
• MCP support: call tools from any MCP server and tap into a rich external ecosystem
• Skills support: load project-level and global skills to reuse instructions and workflows
• ACP protocol: act as an agent for any ACP client, such as Zacp, Zed, and Codeg
• Context compression: automatically compresses long conversations to prevent context overflow
• Session management: persistent storage with session resume and switching
• Permission confirmation: dangerous operations (e.g. shell commands) require human approval before execution

Quick Start

Installation

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helloxz/zlite/main/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helloxz/zlite/main/install.ps1 | iex

Initialization

After installation, run zlite and follow the prompts to enter your OpenAI-compatible model information.

Commands and Shortcuts

• /init: initialize the project
• /new: start a new conversation (shortcut: Ctrl + N)
• /sessions: switch to a previous conversation (shortcut: Ctrl + L)
• /switch: switch models (shortcut: Shift + Tab)
• /thinking: toggle thinking effort (shortcut: Ctrl + T)
• /compress: compress the context (available after more than 10 turns)
• /exit: quit the TUI (shortcut: Ctrl + C)
• Switch plan / build mode: Tab
• Scroll the chat area: PgUp / PgDn to page, Home / End to jump to top / bottom

One-Click Update

Linux & macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helloxz/zlite/main/update.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helloxz/zlite/main/update.ps1 | iex

Build from Source

Requires Go ≥ 1.25

make build        # produces bin/zlite with the version info injected
bin/zlite --version

Contact

• Blog: https://blog.xiaoz.org/
• X: https://x.com/xiaozblog