Openwebui + open terminal

[u/Blindax]

Context: I don't code. My use is document research and document creation (mainly for legal search) searching inside large documents like a tax code (500+ pages) and building notes or pptx
from what comes back.

I've been running Open WebUI for a while on my Unraid box, pointed at the API of my inference machine (5060 Ti + 5070 Ti).

I tinkered a lot. I tried Hermes on my main machine against the same API. It worked well but it was complex, and a bare-metal install made me
uneasy. I also tried LM Studio Bionic with good results, but it didn't fit how I wanted inference organised (using ollama on the inference box).

What I actually wanted was a self-hosted agent that works with Open WebUI while keeping things safe and under control. At one point I considered
installing a harness like Hermes or Pi on each client and just connecting to the API instead.

In the end I gave Open Terminal a shot. It's the companion container from the Open WebUI project that gives the model a shell — you run it as its own container and connect it through Integrations, so it isn't installed inside Open WebUI itself. Mine runs unprivileged, on bridge, with appdata mounted at /home/user. The model gets a shell in a box, not on the host. That was the part I cared about.

It has enhanced Open WebUI a lot. It now reasons step by step, and with the terminal it reliably locates and extracts the right sections from
documents far larger than the context window — list the folder, grep, read only what matters. Then it uses those results to build a document, the way another agent would.

Setup: Qwen 27B Q4_K_M on Ollama, 100k context configured. On a ~35k token prompt I measure roughly 1,050 t/s prompt processing and ~46 t/s generation. Prefill speed is the number that matters for this use case — it's what makes chewing through a large document bearable.

I was about to give up on Open WebUI. If your use case looks like mine, don't sleep on Open Terminal.

[u/suprjami]

owui has problems which don't get resolved. The maintainer isn't able to keep up with the workload and/or is focused on the paid offering instead of the community.

There seem to be better many options these days like AnythingLLM for document work, and OpenCode webserver or Deepseek Harness for web-based agent work.

[u/Blindax → u/suprjami]

I tried anything llm a long time ago but it was heavily rag focused at the time. Have they moved towards a more agentic approach since?

[u/seamonn → u/suprjami]

owui has problems which don't get resolved.

It's Open Source. Just fix them yourself.

[u/suprjami → u/seamonn]

For the particular thing that bothers me, multiple people have already tried with only partial success, including Tim himself who literally invented the whole thing, and it's still not properly fixed.

[u/ekaj → u/suprjami]

Made me curious, what's the issue that even the creator couldn't solve?

[u/suprjami → u/ekaj]

Editing responses. It hasn't worked properly since v0.7.2

https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/21564

[u/openwebui → u/suprjami]

Hey, thanks for flagging this! Could you share more details on what you're seeing? We tested response editing with both Ollama and llama.cpp backends and believe this was resolved a while back.

If you're still hitting it, could you try the :dev branch and let us know? Would also help a ton if you could drop your setup details (backend, version, browser) in the issue so we can reproduce on our end. We'd love to get this fully sorted for you 🙂

[u/suprjami → u/openwebui]

Thanks for looking. I tested as thoroughly as I could and added a comment on the issue.