About

Why malac exists

malac is a coding agent for the terminal, written in Rust and released as open source. It grew out of two needs that existing tools did not meet well.

A gateway-first agent

malac was created to work with its author's own universal model proxy, Lora Gateway, which puts many models behind one endpoint and speaks both the OpenAI and the Anthropic wire formats. That is why malac speaks both formats too, lets you configure several providers at once, and treats gateways as first-class rather than as a workaround: model aliases, per-model limits, a separate model for images, and costs taken from what the gateway reports.

The same design works for any gateway, a provider's own API, or a model on your machine. See Using an LLM gateway and Configure a provider.

Full control of a computer, local or remote

malac was also built to control a computer completely: screenshots, mouse and keyboard, and browsers with their own profiles. The control service, malac-control, is a separate program, so it can run on another machine that has a desktop. That makes it possible to test GUIs and websites on remote machines, with malac running wherever you are.

See Computer and browser control and Controlling a remote machine.

Design ideas

• Terminal first

  malac <prompt> starts working at once, and the full-screen terminal UI is the home base. The web UI and VS Code are views onto the same sessions.

• Subagents you can watch

  Delegated work runs in subagents with their own context, and every step they take is on the same event bus as the main agent, live in every front end.

• Your data stays local

  Sessions are JSONL files and memories are Markdown files on your machine. Prompts go to the model provider you choose; there is no account and no cloud copy.

• Any provider

  One model or many, through the OpenAI or the Anthropic format, directly or through a gateway, remote or local. Switch at any time.

Opinionated by design

malac is built around the way its author works, and it changes whenever that workflow does, to make everyday work faster and more comfortable. Defaults, keybindings and features follow from that, not from a roadmap or a committee.

It is open source so anyone can use it without wondering what runs under the hood: every prompt, tool and network call is in the repository. It is shared as is, not run as a community project. Issues and ideas are welcome, but changes that pull it in a different direction may not be merged.

The name

Malac is Hungarian for pig, which explains the mascot. It is also quick to type: five letters, three of them on the home row, which matters for a command you run all day.

Credits

malac is created by lobirus.

The site and the web UI use the Geist and Geist Mono typefaces, under the SIL Open Font License. The docs are built with Astro and Starlight.

License

malac is open source under the MIT license. You can use, change and share it, including commercially.