Can you recommend a lightweight matrix chat client to me?
Can you recommend a lightweight matrix chat client to me?
My laptop is getting old and i can't have Element eat up half of my RAM. There are many more clients out there but which one is good? aka "the best? ;-)
My requirements: lightweight, encryption 100% supported, active development/community. runs neatly 24/7 in the background.
Should also support the latest features, let me customize when to get notifications: priorities / muted chatrooms. And ideally also look clean and run on the Pinephone. But that's optional.
I don't care which desktop environment or cli.
What do you use?
Have you tried Nheko? I switched to XMPP some time ago, but when I used matrix Nheko was my goto. Also gomuks is another choice, runs in terminal
Why the switch to XMPP btw?
Better native client support for the most part, but xmpp servers also show themselves better (faster, more stable...) than matrix.org I think more matrix users should consider using smaller instances tbh
i am currently testing https://iamb.chat/ it's a bit unique in how it does things but promising of you're into TUI and vim
neochat has been my go to
I was using NeoChat for a while, but IIRC it doesn't support encrypted historical messages, so you'd have to get it set up and keep element around for searching history...
NeoChat has the benefit of supporting OIDC which my server uses exclusively, otherwise I would have given Fractal a look as well.
If you are an Emacs user, then I suggest you try out Ement.el!
Emacs is such a weird Texteditor i must say.
At this point, it would be insane to classify it as a text editor only. I personally refer to it as the "Emacs distribution"; a distribution that happens to have its own integrated text editor and other useful tools. But a more accurate description is, Emacs is an e-lisp interpreter and because of this it's a very extensible tool!
There is a desktop Fluffychat client written in Flutter I believe.
Don't know about the options you need, I just use it on my laptop because it isn't element.
Try gomuks. It's cli written in go. Highly configurable and if your terminal supports images, it'll show them too.
This client is cool! Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks. I'm halfway through installing all of you people's recommendations. I'm a bit disappointed in the way encryption is handled in matrix. I'm again running into issues. gomuks gives me its fingerprint but element doesn't do that kind of verification any more. Guess I have to try more client until I find one that combines all kinds of verifications and I can get encryption set up and connected between them.
I don't think it will meet all your requirements (besides being light-weight), but I've been using weechat-matrix for a week and it's been fine. Without this, I wouldn't use matrix at all.
There's matrix-cli, but i don't know anything about it.
Cinny on the desktop.
Only using Android for socials and only tried element. I want something different. Element has a settings overload, but no way to remove the status bar icon. I hate that so much I just leave it disabled in settings unless I need to use it.
what do you mean by status bar icon? if you mean the persistent notification, it's so element isn't killed by android and can receive push notifications without google play services
Yeah. I like my home screen like Gnome's DE; nothing on it whatsoever. I only want my 3 button navigation, clock, WiFi status and battery. Absolute fine grain control over my notifications is very important to me. I'm extremely burned out on notifications used for user attention manipulation on the google framework. I an on Graphene with no google services. I only want notifications if they can be default opt-in and primarily peer to peer for things like DM. I don't want any visual indicator for such background services. Basically, I expect SMS like functionality; out of sight, out of mind until needed.
for the curious, how much RAM do you have?
8GB on my laptop but shared with a modern browser with 500 tabs open, an editor(/IDE), mail-client and whatever gnome likes to waste resources on (gnome-shell, gnome-software in the background etc). that accumulates to a bit less than 5GB. Plus whatever i currently need open to work on. And a computer needs a bit spare to buffer/cache things.
The pinephone has 3GB of RAM.
It's not nothing. But also not enough to have every other application written in Flutter.
Sounds like matrix client should be the least of your concerns actually. My RAM usage rarely goes beyond 2gb with xfce and firefox. Switching to NetSurf like above comment pointed out is a bit of overreaction actually, Firefox with Ublock Origin and a handful of tabs open will do just well
The matrix website has an extensive list of matrix clients out there. Idk why this question is still asked when the answer is very easily found.
Two of the top answers here are missing from that list and, to be frank, that list does not really contain any useful information. For example, where do I see on that list which clients can display images?