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Show HN: Gerbil – an open source desktop app for running LLMs locally (github.com)

37 points by lone-cloud ↗ HN
Gerbil is an open source app that I've been working on for the last couple of months. The development now is largely done and I'm unlikely to add anymore major features. Instead I'm focusing on any bug fixes, small QoL features and dependency upgrades.

Under the hood it runs llama.cpp (via koboldcpp) backends and allows easy integration with the popular modern frontends like Open WebUI, SillyTavern, ComfyUI, StableUI (built-in) and KoboldAI Lite (built-in).

Why did I create this? I wanted an all-in-one solution for simple text and image-gen local LLMs. I got fed up with needing to manage multiple tools for the various LLM backends and frontends. In addition, as a Linux Wayland user I needed something that would work and look great on my system.

5 comments

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throwaway81998
Serious question, not a "what's the point of this" shitpost... My experience with local LLMs is limited.

Just installed LM Studio on a new machine today (2025 Asus ROG Flow Z13, 96GB VRAM, running Linux). Haven't had the time to test it out yet.

Is there a reason for me to choose Gerbil instead? Or something else entirely?

WillAdams
The big feature which I would like to see is a way to easily interact with the content of the local filesystem --- I have a prompt for re-naming scans based on parsing their content which I've been using in Copilot --- recent changes require that I:

- launch Copilot

- enter a prompt to get it into Copilot Pages mode

- click a button to actually get into that mode

- paste in the prompt

- drag in 20 files

- wait for them to upload

- click the button to process the prompt on the uploaded files

- quit Copilot, launch Copilot, delete the conversation, quit, launch Copilot and have it not start, which then allows repeating from the beginning

It would be much easier if I could just paste in the prompt specifying a folder full of files for it to run on, then clear that folder out for the next day's files and repeat.

Would that be something which your front-end could do? If not, is there one which could do that now? (apparently jan.ai has something like this on their roadmap for 0.8)

tell_me_whai
Hey, funny finding you comment as I've actually recently been developing a CLI app to improve LLM integration in my filesystem. Not sure what you are doing with your files, but maybe it could be useful for you too! You can check it out on my github (https://github.com/gael-vanderlee/whai) and hopefully that can help you with your use case. Look into roles in particular, as they allow you to save and reuse specific workflows.
radial_symmetry
I like that it has image generation without all the complication of ComfyUI. Can it load LoRA?
tell_me_whai
Does this allow for mixing LLMs and Image Gen? I find LLMs really useful to generate image prompts that diffusion models understand (which can be tedious to do manually). Although you need very detailed system prompts to teach what Image Gen models expect.