Rin Chat: a SillyTavern alternative that runs as a desktop app

It is a desktop app, not a local server

Rin Chat installs from a normal installer and opens like any other program. There is no Node.js to keep current, no launch script, no localhost port, and no browser tab that gets lost among thirty others. It has real windows, real menus and a settings screen that behaves the way desktop software does. You can pop Settings out into its own window and keep writing beside it, and every window worth resizing remembers the size you left it at, individually. Every character picker in the app is the same picker, and so is every model picker. Regenerate, swipe, continue, edit the last message and jump to the composer all have keyboard shortcuts, you can rebind them, and a key tells you what they are.

Installing it takes a minute, and staying current takes nothing

Setup is the step that loses people, so it is the step that got the most attention. You download one file and run it. There is nothing to install first, no runtime to match a version against, no repository to clone, and nothing to configure before the app opens. Windows gets an installer and Linux gets both an AppImage to run in place and a .deb if you would rather install it properly. On the other side of that, add your API key and you are writing.

• Updates arrive on their own. The app notices a new version, fetches it and tells you it is ready.
• It never restarts itself. Your vault is open and a reply might be mid-stream, so it waits for you to say when. An update has never eaten a message.
• Each install type updates the way it should: the AppImage and the Windows build replace themselves, and a .deb install is updated as a package instead of being quietly broken by a self-update that cannot find it.
• Nothing about an update touches your library, and a full backup of everything, cards, chats and settings, is one button in Settings whenever you want one.
• New versions ship often, and every release is written up in plain language rather than as a list of commits.

A card format that hands the model structure instead of a wall of text

A V2 card keeps the character in a few long free-text fields. Everything about them arrives as one block of prose and the model has to work out which part is which. Rin Chat reads those cards natively, and its own format splits them into fields that each have one job:

• Concept, appearance, background and the world around them are separate fields, so nobody has to decide whether looks belong in the description or the personality.
• Personality is a real structure rather than a paragraph: core traits, a list of hard always-and-never rules, and a speech style with its own tone, verbosity, format and recurring patterns.
• Each field reaches the model as its own labelled section, and a field you left empty omits its section completely. No blank headings sitting in the prompt taking up context you paid for.
• Behaviour rules arrive as separate lines rather than sentences buried mid-paragraph, which is the difference between a rule the model follows and one it reads past.
• A card can carry a display-only name for listings and search that is never sent to the model, so a catchy title costs you nothing in context.
• Cards can carry their own image prompt style, document styles, generators and regex scripts, so they behave the same in anyone's copy of the app.
• A card can say what it is, not only who it is: an ordinary character, the player's own persona, an adventure character with a stat block, or the game master running one. A lorebook entry keeps every field SillyTavern uses, so the matching behaviour is identical either side.
• Anything the format does not know about rides along untouched rather than being stripped, which is what makes a card written today still work in a later version.

What that structure gives you as a creator

Structure is not only for the model. Because the fields are separate and typed, the app can check your work: the health check knows a greeting is missing, a description has grown too big, or a lorebook entry has no keys, and a token meter beside each field shows what it costs while you type. When a card misbehaves you can see which field is responsible instead of rereading one long paragraph. The private layer you build around a card (its folder, whether you favourited it, your own notes on it) is dropped when you share it, so it never travels to anyone else.

What happens to a card when it moves between the two

Worth being exact about this, because it is the question that matters when you are deciding whether to try something. Importing loses nothing: a V2 or V3 card keeps everything it had, and the file it arrived in is kept exactly as it came, so anything Rin Chat does not model still survives a round trip. Exporting to SillyTavern format keeps everything SillyTavern understands, which is the whole character. The structured fields merge back into its flat ones under labels rather than staying split, and the few AICC-only extras have no home there, so a card exported that way comes back as a normal V3 card rather than a structured one. Rin Chat's own format is the one that round-trips exactly, and you pick which you want at export time: AICC JSON or PNG for a perfect copy, SillyTavern JSON or PNG for the widest compatibility. Either PNG is a valid character card anywhere that reads them.

Your old cards do not have to stay flat

A card imported from SillyTavern arrives with its prose in the fields it came from, and the structured ones empty, because nothing can be invented from nothing. The card editor has an AI Restructure step that reads the imported text and redistributes it: looks move to appearance, history to background, hard rules out of the middle of a paragraph and into the rules list. You review what it did before keeping it. So a library of flat V2 cards is a starting point rather than a ceiling, and you do not have to rewrite anything by hand to get the benefit of the structure.

Built to work with AI Character Cards

Rin Chat is made by the people behind aicharactercards.com, and the two fit together. Linking your account is optional and the app is complete without it, but if you do:

• An Open in Rin Chat button on a card's page imports it in one click, with the same duplicate and version checks as any other import.
• One listing serves both formats. The site hands Rin Chat the structured AICC version of a card and hands SillyTavern the V3 version of the same card, from the same page, so an author uploads once and nobody has to pick a side.
• Rin Chat tells you when a card in your library has a newer version published on the site.
• Sign in and the app sees what your browser sees, so age-verified accounts get the same cards they would get on the web.
• Upload from the card editor. The app stages the file and opens the site's own submit form for you to finish, so there is no second submission path and nothing is ever posted on your behalf.
• My listings, inside the app, shows every card you have on the site grouped as needs changes, in review and published. Cards in review or needing changes get a pill in the editor.

Your provider, arranged the way you use it

Rin Chat connects to any OpenAI-compatible provider with your own key, and you pay that provider directly. Nothing is resold and nothing sits between you and them. Where a provider offers three hundred models, an alphabetical list is no way to choose one, so you can group them yourself. Call a group "cheap and fast", "uncensored" or "the good one", and those sections appear as headings wherever you pick a model. Groups belong to the provider, so every preset running on it sees the same sections, and image models are grouped separately from text ones.

Your writing is encrypted at rest

Roleplay and fiction get personal, and on most setups it sits on disk as readable files that any program on your machine can open. Rin Chat keeps cards, chats and settings in an encrypted database, with attachments encrypted separately, unlocked by a passphrase you set. There is no cloud account and nothing is uploaded. The encryption protects the copy on your own computer, from anything else running on it.

The extras are already in the box

Rin Chat has no extension system, on purpose. The things people usually go and add are part of the app, they are translated into every language it ships in, and they cannot break each other or fall behind an update.

• Long-term memory that recalls earlier scenes by meaning rather than only the last few messages, plus pinned notes injected into every single turn that never scroll out.
• Text to speech and speech to text, including voices that run entirely on your machine, so read-aloud and dictation need no API and no internet.
• Image generation in the chat, in the character's own visual style.
• Character expressions that change with what the character says, shown beside the chat or visual-novel style above it, chosen by a small model that runs on your own machine. It costs nothing per message and sends nothing anywhere.

Art travels inside the card

In Rin Chat a character's expression sprites, scene pictures and chat backgrounds live in the card, not in a folder you have to keep next to it. Share the card and the art goes with it. A card can call its own images mid-scene to show a picture, switch the background or set an expression, and it can carry its own document styles, so a phone screen or a case file renders the way the author intended in anyone's copy of the app. Export a whole cast as one bundle file and the art, styles and shared lorebooks travel together.

Tools that show you why a card behaves the way it does

Most of the time lost to card authoring goes on guessing. Rin Chat answers the guesses directly:

• A lorebook tester: paste sample text and see which entries would fire and why, whether that is a matched key, no match, disabled, or filtered out.
• A token budget breakdown: how much of the context each part of the prompt is actually taking, as a share of the whole.
• A macro playground and a regex tester, so you can watch a macro or a script resolve against sample text instead of discovering it mid-chat.
• Version history on every card, with restore. Leaving the editor takes a snapshot, so an edit that ruined a character is undoable.
• Shared lorebooks attached to a character rather than to a chat, so they are read in every chat that character is in. One guild or city book can serve several characters, and in a group only the character carrying it reads it, so a faction's secrets stay out of everyone else's prompt.

Group chats where each character is their own

Every member of a group can run on a different provider, model and prompt preset: the cheap fast model for the tavern keeper, the expensive one for the character who matters. You choose how turns are taken, from strict rotation to a talkativeness roll per member, or you just name who you are talking to and they answer. Members can be muted without leaving the group. A reply that drifts into writing someone else's lines is trimmed back before it is saved, so the mistake is never fed back to the model.

Adventure mode, where the app is the referee

Ask a model to run a game and it will happily roll its own dice, which means it never really rolls them. Rin Chat splits the job. The model plays game master and asks for things. The app decides them. It rolls, it applies the result, and because it owns the numbers it can take them back when you rewind the conversation, so an undo undoes your hit points too. A card turns this on for its own chats, and every other chat is untouched by it.

• Dice rolls come with stakes written up front and a button to take the risk, so you know what you are gambling before you gamble it.
• Skill checks read the ability off your character sheet and show their working on the button, so a stealth check says what your dexterity added.
• Talk your way through it. A social check gives you a box to write what you actually say, and the game master grades your words as a bonus or a penalty rather than reducing persuasion to a number.
• Character sheets with abilities, inventory, money, levels and hit points, kept by the app rather than remembered by the model. Rests and maximums are enforced, so nothing heals past full.
• The game master keeps its own hidden state for the world, its plans and its secrets. You can reveal it if you want spoilers, and it stays hidden if you do not.

Replies that can be more than text

A reply in Rin Chat can offer buttons, show a picture, change the background or render as something other than a chat message, and a card can rely on all of it working in anyone else's copy of the app.

• Choice buttons: click one and it becomes your reply. Choices can carry a cost, so picking one spends the coins or the time as part of the click, and can be locked until you are carrying the right thing.
• Hidden text that stays folded until you open it, for clues, secrets and the results of a search.
• Document styles. A card can declare that a block of text is a phone screen, a case file, a newspaper or a terminal, and it renders that way. The built-in styles can be duplicated and rewritten into your own, and a card carries the ones it needs so the effect survives being shared.
• Pictures, expressions and backgrounds called by name from inside a reply, a greeting or a lorebook entry, so a scene can change what you are looking at as it moves.
• Randomizers a card owns and can spin mid-scene for loot, encounters or draws, recording what they dealt rather than asking the model to remember it.

A story director and a card builder

The Story Director works quietly in the background to keep a long scene moving rather than circling. Card Forge builds a character with you through conversation, covering description, personality, greetings and lorebook, for when you have an idea but not a finished card. It runs on your own provider, so nothing in the app polices what you write.

Your phone as a second screen

Rin Chat can serve the chat you have open to a phone browser on the same network, protected by a PIN you set on the desktop, over HTTPS. It is a terminal for the desktop app, not a copy of your data: the phone never touches your library. Good for reading in bed without moving your session anywhere.

Common questions

Can I import my SillyTavern characters into Rin Chat?

Yes. Rin Chat imports V1, V2 and V3 character cards, PNG cards with embedded character data, and SillyTavern World Info JSON. You can import a whole folder at once.

Can I export back to SillyTavern?

Yes. Cards export as a SillyTavern-format PNG with the character data embedded, so a card you build in Rin Chat opens in SillyTavern. Lorebooks export as World Info JSON.

What is the AICC card format?

It is Rin Chat's own card format, a structured superset of Character Card V3. It splits a character into separate fields for concept, appearance, background, world and personality instead of a few long text blocks, so the model receives labelled sections and empty fields take up no context. V2 and V3 cards import and export normally.

Do my imported SillyTavern cards get the benefit of the AICC structure?

Not automatically, because the structured fields cannot be invented from prose that does not separate them. The card editor has an AI Restructure step that redistributes an imported card's text into the right fields for you to review, so you do not have to rewrite anything by hand. An imported card works fine either way.

If I export a card back to SillyTavern, do I lose anything?

You keep the whole character. The structured fields merge back into SillyTavern's flat ones under labels instead of staying split, and a few AICC-only extras such as embedded generators have no equivalent there. Rin Chat's own AICC export is the format that round-trips exactly, so export to that if you want a perfect copy.

Do I need an aicharactercards.com account?

No. Rin Chat is complete without one. Linking an account adds one-click imports from the site, update notices when a card you own has a newer version, and uploading from the card editor.

Does Rin Chat work on macOS?

Not yet, but it is coming and it is not the engineering that is holding it up. Apple requires a Mac app to be signed and notarised before it can be distributed, and that is waiting on Apple finishing its verification of the company. We cannot promise a date because the timing is not ours. Today Windows and Linux are the released platforms, and SillyTavern runs on macOS.

Is Rin Chat free?

Yes, with every feature unlocked, no trial and no account. You connect your own API key from whichever provider you choose and pay that provider directly.

Which AI models can I use?

Any OpenAI-compatible provider, using your own key. Rin Chat does not host models and does not sit between you and your provider.

Is my data sent anywhere?

Your cards, chats and settings stay on your machine, encrypted at rest. The prompt you send goes straight from your device to the AI provider you chose and does not pass through us. The app also reports basic usage so we can tell what to fix and what to build: a random installation id with your app version, operating system and language, which cannot be turned off, plus optional items you control in Settings such as which providers you use and how big your library is. None of it ever includes your characters, chats, lorebooks or API keys, not even their names. The privacy policy and terms spell out exactly what is sent.

Do I have to stop using SillyTavern?

No. They are separate programs with separate storage, and cards move between them in both directions, so you can run both and keep the same characters in each.