zdsk

A terminal chat client for the DeepSeek API, written in Zig 0.16.0.

Features

• Multi-turn conversation — full message history is sent with each request
• Fenced code blocks rendered as full-width coloured rectangles using truecolor ANSI
• Terminal width detected at runtime via ioctl(TIOCGWINSZ) for accurate padding
• Model selectable at launch via CLI argument
• Zero dependencies — only the Zig standard library

Requirements

• Zig 0.16.0
• A DeepSeek API key
• A truecolor terminal (kitty, alacritty, iTerm2, GNOME Terminal 3.36+, etc.)

Build / Run

make deploy
# or...
make run

The binary is placed at zig-out/bin/zdsk.

Usage

Export your API key, then run:

export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="your-key-here"
./zig-out/bin/zdsk

To use a different model, pass it as the first argument:

./zig-out/bin/zdsk deepseek-chat

Available models:

Model	Description
deepseek-chat	DeepSeek-V3.2, standard mode
deepseek-reasoner	DeepSeek-V3.2, thinking/reasoning mode (default)

In-session commands

Input	Action
Any text + Enter	Send message
/exit or /quit	Quit
Ctrl-D	Quit

Notes

• The write_buffer_size on std.http.Client is set to 8192 bytes to avoid a known hang with large HTTPS POST payloads (Zig issue #25015).
• If stdout is not a TTY (e.g. piped), termWidth falls back to 80 columns.