Your first chat

With Ollama running and at least one chat model pulled, you’re ready to use Ekorbia.

Launch the app

Open Ekorbia from your Applications folder. The main window appears with:

• Sidebar on the left — your history of chats, plus a search box and a + New chat button at the top
• Chat pane in the middle — currently empty
• Right panel on the right with three tabs (📋 Prompts, 👁 Watches, 📄 Files)
• Composer at the bottom — where you type
• Status bar at the very bottom — shows Ollama’s status and any background indexing

Pick your model

In the bottom-right of the composer there’s a model picker showing the active model’s name. Click it to see every model currently installed in Ollama. Pick one.

Your choice persists across launches — Ekorbia remembers the last model you used and re-opens to it. If that model is no longer installed (e.g. you ran ollama rm), Ekorbia silently falls back to the first available one.

Badges on the model name. If the active model can use tools (write files automatically), a small TOOL badge appears next to its name. If you’ve attached an image to the chat, a VISION badge appears on the image chip when the model can see it.

Send your first message

Click in the composer and type something — anything from “Hello” to a real question. Press Enter to send. (To insert a newline without sending, use Shift+Enter.)

The model’s reply streams in token-by-token. While it’s streaming, the Send button turns into a Stop button — see Streaming and the Stop button.

Tabs

Click + New chat in the top-left to open a second conversation in a new tab. Each tab has its own message history, model, and attachments. Switching tabs is instant.

To rename a chat, click its title at the top of the chat pane. Press Enter to save, Esc to cancel. Renames flow through to the history sidebar.

What’s next

You now know enough to use Ekorbia for basic chat. The rest of this guide covers the features that make Ekorbia more than a chat front-end:

• Attaching files and folders — ask questions over your own documents
• The prompts library — reusable system prompts stored as Markdown files
• Watches — ambient background summarization of folders, feeds, and URLs
• Quick-query overlay — Spotlight-style popup that works over any app
• Screenshot capture — region-select a screenshot straight into a vision chat
• Saving files from chat — let the model write files directly to disk
• Memory file — personal context Ekorbia injects into every chat

If you ever want to re-run the in-app onboarding tour, head to Settings → General → Help → Show tour again.