IChat

IChat Extension Guide

Language: English | 简体中文

What IChat Does

IChat is a Chrome side panel extension for context-aware AI chat. Its core idea is intelligent context capture with a seamless Q&A flow, while staying fully local-first so users do not need to route their prompts or API keys through a project-owned backend.

More concretely, IChat watches the region you hover over or the text you select, intelligently builds a context object called FlowContext, opens the side panel, and turns the whole context-to-chat handoff into a much smoother experience.

Example scenario:

There are two main capture paths in IChat:

• Selection capture: Select the text you care about first, then press Ctrl+Shift+Y (the default shortcut) to capture the selected text together with nearby implicit context.
• Smart capture: Press Ctrl+Shift+Y (the default shortcut) to trigger context capture, and the highlighted target updates as your mouse moves. If the result is not what you want, use the mouse wheel to adjust the capture scope, or press Esc to cancel.

Current Capabilities

• selection-first capture
• smart DOM capture when no text is selected
• image-aware attachment handling
• native side panel chat UI
• detached chat tab
• BYOK support for OpenAI-compatible providers, Gemini, and Anthropic

How To Use IChat

1. Load / Install The Extension

From GitHub Releases:

1. open the Releases page
2. download the latest ichat-chrome-mv3-prod-<version>.zip
3. extract the zip to a local folder
4. open chrome://extensions/
5. enable Developer mode
6. choose Load unpacked
7. select the extracted extension folder

For local development:

1. run npm install
2. run npm run build
3. open chrome://extensions/
4. enable Developer mode
5. choose Load unpacked
6. select build/chrome-mv3-prod

2. Open The Side Panel

You can open IChat by:

• clicking the extension action
• using the configured capture shortcut, which defaults to Ctrl+Shift+Y

3. Settings

General

• Supports English and Simplified Chinese, with system-following as the default behavior.
• Messages sent with each request controls how many previous messages are attached to a new request. The default value is 6, which keeps enough recent context for multi-turn conversations while still saving tokens and reducing latency.
• You can clear locally stored conversation history.

LLM Providers

Open Settings and add one of the following:

• an OpenAI-compatible API key, such as Doubao or another compatible provider
• a Gemini API key from Google AI Studio
• an Anthropic API key

FlowContext

• Auto-send
  • When auto-send is on, captured context enters the send pipeline immediately without requiring a manual send step.
  • When auto-send is off, you can type your own prompt first and then send it together with the captured context.
• FlowContext system instructions act as the system prompt and can be customized.
• Inspect FlowContext lets you review the current captured fields and prompt content.

Local Storage And Data Flow

In the current implementation:

• settings and keys are stored in extension local storage
• FlowContext and chat snapshots are stored locally
• image attachments are stored in IndexedDB
• requests are sent directly to the selected provider

For more detail, see the Privacy Policy.

Permissions Summary

IChat currently needs Chrome extension capabilities related to:

• local storage
• interacting with the active page for capture
• side panel presentation
• content script injection and page scripting needed for capture

How Capture Works

When you trigger IChat on a normal http or https page, the extension tries to gather relevant context from the current page.

Capture may include:

• selected text
• smart DOM target text
• surrounding implicit context
• page metadata
• image attachment metadata

If an image target cannot be resolved directly, IChat may use a screenshot-based fallback for the visible target area.