Gloss — Communication skill for Claude Code

Gloss

Inline clarifications for CLI-agent conversations.

Gloss is a local desktop chat app that runs on top of the coding agents you already have installed: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Pi and Cursor Agent. It drives them in their non-interactive modes, renders the conversation like a desktop chat client, and adds one thing those clients lack:

Highlight any text in a response, ask about it, and the answer appears inline under that sentence, collapsible, with threaded follow-ups.

A *gloss* is a short explanation written beside a word in a text.

Also in the box: artifacts (a page, drawing, diagram, document or file the agent writes shows as a card in the reply and opens in a side pane with a sandboxed preview, versions and save), attachments of images and text files, full-text search across every conversation and find within the open one (Cmd/Ctrl+F), pinned and tagged conversations, and export of a reply or a whole conversation as Markdown with the clarifications folded in under the sentences they were asked about.

The same gesture works in the browser: the Gloss extension (Chrome-family, Firefox and Safari) puts "Ask about this" on any highlighted passage of a web page, shows the reply in a popover anchored to it, and leaves a mark that returns on the next visit. Every page you asked about is listed under **Pages** in Gloss. See `docs/extension.md`.

Stack

• Frontend: Svelte 5 (runes) + SvelteKit static build, plain CSS, Shiki
• Shell: Tauri 2
• Engine: Rust crate (engine/), linked into the shell; SQLite via rusqlite

See `docs/architecture.md`, `docs/agents.md` (how each CLI is driven and its caveats) and `docs/api.md` (shell ↔ frontend contract).

Install

Download the installer for your platform from the GitHub release:

Platform	File
macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel)	Gloss__aarch64.dmg or Gloss__x64.dmg
Windows	Gloss__x64-setup.exe (NSIS) or Gloss__x64_en-US.msi