nheko

The motivation behind the project is to provide a native desktop app for Matrix that feels more like a mainstream chat app (Riot, Telegram etc) and less like an IRC client.

Note regarding End-to-End encryption

Currently the implementation is at best a proof of concept and it should only be used for testing purposes.

Features

Most of the features you would expect from a chat application are missing right now but we are getting close to a more feature complete client. Specifically there is support for:

• E2E encryption (text messages only: attachments are currently sent unencrypted).
• User registration.
• Creating, joining & leaving rooms.
• Sending & receiving invites.
• Sending & receiving files and emoji (inline widgets for images, audio and file messages).
• Typing notifications.
• Username auto-completion.
• Message & mention notifications.
• Redacting messages.
• Read receipts.
• Basic communities support.
• Room switcher (ctrl-K).
• Light, Dark & System themes.

Installation

Releases

Releases for Linux (AppImage), macOS (disk image) & Windows (x64 installer) can be found on the Bintray repo.

Repositories

Arch Linux

pacaur -S nheko # nheko-git

Fedora

sudo dnf install nheko

Gentoo Linux

sudo layman -a matrix
sudo emerge -a nheko

Alpine Linux (and postmarketOS)

Make sure you have the testing repositories from edge enabled. Note that this is not needed on postmarketOS.

sudo apk add nheko

Build Requirements

• Qt5 (5.7 or greater). Qt 5.7 adds support for color font rendering with Freetype, which is essential to properly support emoji.
• CMake 3.1 or greater.
• mtxclient
• matrix-structs
• LMDB
• Boost 1.66 or greater.
• libolm
• libsodium
• spdlog
• A compiler that supports C++ 14:
  • Clang 5 (tested on Travis CI)
  • GCC 7 (tested on Travis CI)
  • MSVC 19.13 (tested on AppVeyor)

Linux

If you don't want to install any external dependencies, you can generate an AppImage locally using docker.

make docker-app-image

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S qt5-base \
    qt5-tools \
    qt5-multimedia \
    qt5-svg \
    cmake \
    gcc \
    fontconfig \
    lmdb \
    boost \
    libsodium

Gentoo Linux

sudo emerge -a ">=dev-qt/qtgui-5.7.1" media-libs/fontconfig

Ubuntu (e.g 14.04)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:beineri/opt-qt592-trusty
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:george-edison55/cmake-3.x
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r-test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y g++-7 qt59base qt59svg qt59tools qt59multimedia cmake liblmdb-dev libsodium-dev 

macOS (Xcode 8 or later)

brew update
brew install qt5 lmdb cmake llvm libsodium spdlog boost

Windows

1. Install Visual Studio 2017's "Desktop Development" and "Linux Development with C++" (for the CMake integration) workloads.

2. Download the latest Qt for windows installer and install it somewhere. Make sure to install the MSVC 2017 64-bit toolset for at least Qt 5.9 (lower versions does not support VS2017).

3. Install dependencies with vcpkg. You can simply clone it into a subfolder of the root nheko source directory.

git clone http:\\github.com\Microsoft\vcpkg
cd vcpkg
.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
.\vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows \
	boost-asio \
	boost-beast \
	boost-iostreams \
	boost-random \
	boost-signals2 \
	boost-system \
	boost-thread \
	libsodium \
	lmdb \
	openssl \
	zlib

4. Install dependencies not managed by vcpkg. (libolm, libmtxclient, libmatrix_structs)

Inside the project root run the following (replacing the path to vcpkg as necessary).

cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -Hdeps -B.deps
        -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:/Users/<your-path>/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
        -DUSE_BUNDLED_BOOST=OFF
cmake --build .deps --config Release
cmake --build .deps --config Debug

Building

First we need to install the rest of the dependencies that are not available in our system

cmake -Hdeps -B.deps \
    -DUSE_BUNDLED_BOOST=OFF # if we already have boost & spdlog installed.
    -DUSE_BUNDLED_SPDLOG=OFF
cmake --build .deps

We can now build nheko by pointing it to the path that we installed the dependencies.

cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=.deps/usr
cmake --build build

If the build fails with the following error

Could not find a package configuration file provided by "Qt5Widgets" with
any of the following names:

Qt5WidgetsConfig.cmake
qt5widgets-config.cmake

You might need to pass -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to cmake to point it at your qt5 install.

e.g on macOS

cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt5)
cmake --build build

The nheko binary will be located in the build directory.

Nix

Download the repo as mentioned above and run

nix-build

in the project folder. This will output a binary to result/bin/nheko.

You can also install nheko by running nix-env -f . -i

Windows

After installing all dependencies, you need to edit the CMakeSettings.json to be able to load and compile nheko within Visual Studio.

You need to fill out the paths for the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE and the Qt5_DIR. The toolchain file should point to the vcpkg.cmake and the Qt5 dir to the lib\cmake\Qt5 dir.

Examples for the paths are:

• C:\\vcpkg\\scripts\\buildsystems\\vcpkg.cmake
• C:\\Qt\\5.10.1\\msvc2017_64\\lib\\cmake\\Qt5

Now right click into the root nheko source directory and choose Open in Visual Studio. You can choose the build type Release and Debug in the top toolbar. After a successful CMake generation you can select the nheko.exe as the run target. Now choose Build all in the CMake menu or press F7 to compile the executable.

To be able to run the application the last step is to install the needed Qt dependencies next to the nheko binary.

Start the "Qt x.xx.x 64-bit for Desktop (MSVC 2017)" command promt and run windeployqt.

cd <path-to-nheko>\build-vc\Release\Release
windeployqt nheko.exe

The final binary will be located inside build-vc\Release\Release for the Release build and build-vc\Debug\Debug for the Debug build.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING

Screens

Here is a screen shot to get a feel for the UI, but things will probably change.

Third party

• Emoji One
• Font Awesome
• Open Sans