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Your first chat

After the wizard, you land in a chat with Pluma — the built-in character. She knows she's the software you're running and is the safest starting point: ask her how anything works.

Sending a message

Type into the composer at the bottom and press Enter. The model streams its reply back; click Stop to abort generation mid-stream.

Shift-Enter adds a newline without sending.

Switching characters

Open the drawer (☰ on mobile, sidebar on desktop) → Characters tab. Tap a card to resume your most recent chat with that character; tap the + to start a fresh one.

Drop your own Tavern PNGs into <datadir>/characters/ and they show up automatically. See Characters & cards.

Starting a fresh chat

  • With the same character: the + icon on the character row.
  • Direct (no character, raw model): the home logo at the top of the sidebar. The assistant's name in chat reads as the active model id (e.g. qwen2.5-32b-instruct) so you can tell it apart from a character chat.

Where the chat lives

Each conversation persists to <datadir>/conversations/<id>.json, encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. The key lives in your OS keyring (Keychain on macOS, libsecret on Linux, Credential Manager on Windows). Reload the page and conversations come back; restart the binary, same.

Per-conversation persona

If you've set up a persona (Settings → Personas), pick it from the as: … dropdown at the top of the chat. The persona's name fills {{user}} in card prose and lands explicitly in the system prompt so the assistant addresses you by name. See Personas.

What to try next