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.

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:

• 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

There are continuous nightly releases here for Linux (AppImage, rpm, deb), Mac and Windows.

Arch Linux

pacaur -S nheko-git

# or

pacaur -S nheko

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.
• LMDB.
• A compiler that supports C++11.
  • Clang 3.8 (or greater).
  • GCC 7 (or greater).

Linux

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

make docker-app-image

If you're on Debian you should use make docker-debian-appimage instead, which uses Debian as the build host in an attempt to work around this issue.

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S qt5-base qt5-tools qt5-multimedia cmake gcc fontconfig lmdb

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 apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y qt59base qt59tools qt59multimedia cmake liblmdb-dev

To build on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty out-of-the-box requires using Clang 3.6 instead of GCC:

sudo apt-get install clang-3.6
export CC=clang-3.6 CXX=clang++-3.6

On Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, it's possible to use GCC 4.9.4+, but it is not recommended, because it requires installing GCC packages from third-party PPAs. Later versions of Ubuntu that come with GCC 4.9.4+ should work with GCC out-of-the-box.

macOS (Xcode 8 or later)

brew update
brew install qt5 lmdb cmake llvm

Building

Clone the repo and run

make release

which invokes cmake and translates to

cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
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=RelWithDebInfo -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

Contributing

Any kind of contribution to the project is greatly appreciated. You are also encouraged to open feature request issues.

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