Installation

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-06-01 00:50 PDT

chatter runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Pre-built binaries are available from the GitHub Releases page; choose the plain vX.Y.Z TalkBank core release entry and its chatter-v... assets (VS Code preview releases use vscode-vX.Y.Z tags in the same repository). To build from source, follow the instructions below.

Prerequisites

Rust (stable) — install via rustup (supports Windows, macOS, Linux)

If you are only building the chatter CLI from source, Rust is sufficient. The extras below are only needed when you work on the grammar or generated artifacts:

Node.js — required for tree-sitter grammar generation
tree-sitter CLI — cargo install tree-sitter-cli

Installing chatter (CLI)

The chatter CLI is the primary tool for working with CHAT files. It provides validation, format conversion, and batch processing.

From Source

Clone the repository:

mkdir -p ~/talkbank && cd ~/talkbank
git clone https://github.com/TalkBank/batchalign.git

Build and install:

cd ~/talkbank/batchalign
cargo install --path crates/chatter/chatter-cli

This installs the chatter binary to ~/.cargo/bin/ (macOS/Linux) or %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin\ (Windows).

Verify Installation

chatter --version
chatter --help

Building the Libraries

If you’re developing with the Rust crates directly:

cd ~/talkbank/batchalign
cargo build           # Build all crates
cargo test            # Run all tests
cargo clippy          # Lint check

See the Makefile targets for additional commands.

Directory Layout

Everything lives in a single repository:

~/talkbank/
└── batchalign/             # This repository
    ├── grammar/            # Tree-sitter grammar
    ├── crates/             # All Rust crates (talkbank-* and batchalign-*)
    ├── resources/spec/     # CHAT specification (source of truth)
    ├── resources/corpus/   # Reference corpus
    ├── apps/vscode-extension/   # VS Code extension
    ├── apps/chatter/       # Chatter Desktop (Tauri, experimental)
    ├── apps/batchalign/    # Batchalign Desktop + dashboard (Tauri, experimental)
    ├── python/             # batchalign Python package
    └── book/               # TalkBank Toolchain mdBook

The CLI, grammar, crates, Batchalign pipeline, and all related tools are in this single repository.

Keyboard shortcuts