SalastilandClaude Opus 5
c0ff53e833
The README opened with "a unified desktop chat client" and a paragraph about the UI only ever seeing a service-agnostic account/buffer/message model. That is a true and useful sentence to a maintainer and the wrong first sentence for somebody deciding whether to download this: 223 lines in, the wire protocol and the on-disk layout came before anything about what it is like to use. So the README is now a page: what moho is, what it does, where to get it, and the four commands to build and run it. Everything else moved to ARCHITECTURE.md rather than being deleted - the daemon split, the JSON-RPC surface, what each backend actually implements, where state lives - because none of it was wrong, it was only in the wrong place. Three of the old build instructions were wrong, which is the other reason to rewrite rather than trim. `npm run pack:appimage` is not a script. There is no pacman target, so `pacman -U dist/moho-0.1.0.pacman` installs nothing; the PKGBUILD is the Arch path. And builds have been named after their commit since the AppImages started accumulating, so `moho-0.1.0.AppImage` is a filename that no longer occurs. Every command the new page names is checked against package.json. The prerequisites are named now, too: cmake, pkg-config and the ALSA headers. Nobody knew to write those down until CI met a machine that did not already have them. Carried forward with a correction: the IRC section claimed twelve capabilities. It negotiates twenty-four, four of them drafts, plus WHOX - the ticket work landed after that paragraph was last touched. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
3.7 KiB
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.
- Voice calls. Real audio on Discord and on Matrix, including the group calls Element holds on a media server. No video or screen share yet.
- Matrix, properly encrypted. End-to-end encryption with device verification by emoji or QR, cross-signing, key backup, and encrypted attachments.
- Sneedchat over Tor. An embedded Tor client, the site's proof-of-work gate and its login captcha both handled, and every room you've joined connected at once.
- The awkward bits, in-app. Where Discord demands a captcha to add a friend or join a server, it opens in a moho window instead of sending you to a browser.
- 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, rebuilt from master
on every change.
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 unsigned and
cross-built, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.
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
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.
Architecture, the daemon's wire protocol, what each backend actually implements, and where state lives on disk: ARCHITECTURE.md.