moho

Every conversation you're in, in one window.

moho is a desktop chat client that speaks IRC, Discord, Matrix, Kick and Sneedchat at the same time. One buffer list down the side, one log in the middle, one set of habits — whether the room is a twenty-year-old IRC channel, a Discord server, an encrypted Matrix room, or a stream's chat going past at forty lines a minute.

It isn't five web apps in a trenchcoat. Underneath sits a small Rust daemon that holds the connections; the window is just what draws them. Close it and you stay connected. Open it again and everything is where you left it.

What it does

• Five networks, one place. IRC, Discord, Matrix, Kick and Sneedchat, side by side, with the same reply, edit, react, search and tag-someone gestures on each — as far as each service actually supports them.
• A log, not a feed. Compact IRC-style scrollback with nick colours, markdown and BBCode, spoilers, code blocks, inline images and video, and custom emoji. There's a roomier mode with avatars if you prefer one.
• It stays connected. The daemon keeps IRC registered, Matrix syncing and Tor circuits open while the window is shut. Quitting says a proper goodbye rather than dropping the socket, so you don't come back to a ghosted nick.
• Calls. Voice, camera and screen sharing on Discord and on Matrix, including the group calls Element holds on a media server. On Discord, Go Live streams both ways with sound, echo cancellation, volume per person, the soundboard and stage channels. A call can sit in the corner or pop out into a window of its own.
• Matrix, properly encrypted. End-to-end encryption with device verification by emoji or QR, cross-signing, key backup, and encrypted attachments.
• Sneedchat, and Tor where you want it. The site's proof-of-work gate and its login captcha both handled, and every room you've joined connected at once. Any account on any of the five can go through an embedded Tor client or a SOCKS5 proxy instead of the open internet.
• Kick streams in the window. Watch the stream beside its chat, in the corner or in a window of its own, with VODs, clips, 7TV and BTTV emotes, polls and predictions.
• No captchas on Discord, on purpose. Discord puts joining a server, adding a friend and making a server behind a captcha when they come from anything but its own client, and answering one gets an account flagged for spam. moho opens discord.com for those three instead of putting your account at risk.
• Yours. GPL-3.0, no telemetry, no account with us — your history is a SQLite file on your own disk.

Get it

Prebuilt Linux and Windows downloads are on the latest release; what each version changed is in CHANGELOG.md. moho tells you in its mentions inbox when a newer version is out.

Versions are MAJOR.FEATURE.FIX: a major release, then protocols added and major features, then bug and security fixes - 1.1.0 would add a protocol, 1.0.5 is the fifth fix release of 1.0.

The AppImage needs libfuse2 on recent distributions; if it refuses to start, either install that or run it with APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1.

The Windows installer is not code-signed, and won't be. Two things in Windows react to that:

• SmartScreen warns when you run the downloaded installer. Choose More info, then Run anyway - or beforehand, right-click the file, open Properties and tick Unblock.
• Smart App Control, on some fresh Windows 11 installs, silently refuses to start any unsigned program: moho installs, then never opens. Turn it off in Windows Security > App & browser control > Smart App Control settings. Windows does not let it be switched back on without resetting the PC. The installer checks for this and says so before installing.

Build it

You'll need Rust, Node, git, and — for the daemon — cmake, pkg-config and the ALSA headers (alsa-lib on Arch, libasound2-dev on Debian).

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Moho-Chat/moho.git
cd moho
npm install
npm run daemon    # cargo build --release in nobilis/ — this is the long one

If npm says install scripts were blocked, approve the two that fetch platform binaries; without them there is no Electron to run:

npm install-scripts approve electron esbuild

Test it

npm test          # the window's unit tests (Vitest)
npm run test:ui   # layout checks against the real app - popups must stay inside the window
cd nobilis && cargo test --release

test:ui builds the window, runs it against a scratch home and a fake IRC server, and needs the daemon built first. On a machine with no display, run it under xvfb-run.

Run it

npm run dev       # hot-reloading renderer, Electron, and the daemon

To install it like a real application — builds everything, packages an AppImage, drops it in ~/.local/bin and writes a launcher entry, after which moho is in your application menu:

npm run deploy

Other ways out of the box: npm run pack:dir for a self-contained dist/linux-unpacked/ directory to run in place, npm run pack:win for the Windows installer (cross-built with mingw-w64; packaging it also needs wine with 32-bit support), and makepkg -si against the bundled PKGBUILD to install it as an Arch package under /opt/moho.

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Architecture, the daemon's wire protocol, what each backend actually implements, and where state lives on disk: ARCHITECTURE.md.