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?
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
9neochat has been my go to
8I 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.
8If you are an Emacs user, then I suggest you try out Ement.el!
8Emacs is such a weird Texteditor i must say.
2At 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!
2
Try gomuks. It's cli written in go. Highly configurable and if your terminal supports images, it'll show them too.
6This client is cool! Thanks for the suggestion!
2Thanks. 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.
2
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.
6I 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.
4There's matrix-cli, but i don't know anything about it.
4Cinny on the desktop.
3Only 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.
2what 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
3Yeah. 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.
2
for the curious, how much RAM do you have?
28GB 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.
2Permanently Deleted
4Did gou look into what takes up the most memory? You could downgrade from the modern browser with 500 tabs to netsurf with 500 bookmarks, perhaps, or similar. Many modern websites don't work there, though.
Instead of Gnome, I'm using Sway, at the moment it's taking up 236MB resident.
Do you need that mail client to run 24x7? It's better for mental health to check mail when you decide (once in the morning), not when some rando wants to sell you cannabis oil (best cure for any ailment!) - or you might find something tiny that checks for email and shows a desktop notification, so you know to launch your mail client.
Alacritty likes to munch memory, Foot takes up much less, but Foot doesn't render some colors correctly, for whatever reason.
Shop around, there are more options than just changing the Matrix client.
1
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.
-5Two 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?
8