← All features

Private Chat

An ephemeral chat surface for conversations that should leave no trace. Nothing is written to disk, nothing is remembered between sessions, and the transcript is wiped the moment the overlay closes. Open it from the ghost icon in the title bar.

Nothing is persisted

Unlike regular chats, Private Chat does not create a session row, message rows, metrics, or an attachment store. The transcript lives entirely in memory. The moment you close the overlay everything is gone — including the picked model, persona, tone, per-chat instructions, and parameters-panel state. There is nothing to export, nothing to search, and nothing for an attacker with disk access to recover.

Ollama only

The model picker inside Private Chat only lists local Ollama models. OpenAI-compatible providers are deliberately excluded — the data path for cloud providers crosses too many intermediaries (proxies, key vaults, hosted logging) to honour the “leaves no trace” promise.

MCP tools are blocked

Servers configured in Settings → MCP are not exposed to the model inside Private Chat. A tool call could side-channel the conversation out to a third party — that defeats the point. If you need tools, use a regular chat. See MCP support.

Opening and closing

Open Private Chat from the ghost icon in the title bar. It opens as a dark-only overlay above whatever you were doing. The overlay can only be dismissed by the explicit X in its header — clicking outside, pressing Esc, or otherwise stray-clicking does not close it. The wipe is destructive, so we don’t want one accidental click to throw away the conversation.

While Private Chat is open the regular chat surface is paused: any in-flight regular generation is cancelled, and the rest of the app is non-interactive underneath until you close the overlay.

Shaping layers

Private Chat reuses the same prompt-shaping layers as a regular chat — just with a couple of deliberate omissions:

• Persona — pick any of the personas from the composer.
• Tone — pick any tone, or leave it unset to fall back to the default tone from Settings → General.
• Per-chat instructions — a free-form textarea, layered persona → instructions → tone.
• No Space context — Private Chat is never attached to a Space; its instructions, files, and memory don’t apply.
• No {{USER_NAME}} substitution and no temporal preamble — those belong to persistent chats.

Parameters panel

The same parameters panel is available, with the same Simple / Advanced toggle, model defaults, Thinking toggle, and Low VRAM toggle. It closes and wipes along with the rest of the overlay — nothing about it survives the close.