I just made an open source CLI based chat client that supports MCP servers to solve this problem yesterday at https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-chat.
The issue I faced during MCP server development of my Kubernetes MCP server (https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-server-kubernetes) is that I wanted to be able to easily test changes to the server without having to deal with Claude Desktop. Realized that I could make a simple CLI client that lets me automate some of the testing & it just happened to also be a decent terminal based chat client for any production MCP servers too. Requires using your own Anthropic API key, but other than that it should "just work".
The issue I faced during MCP server development of my Kubernetes MCP server (https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-server-kubernetes) is that I wanted to be able to easily test changes to the server without having to deal with Claude Desktop. Realized that I could make a simple CLI client that lets me automate some of the testing & it just happened to also be a decent terminal based chat client for any production MCP servers too. Requires using your own Anthropic API key, but other than that it should "just work".