Many of your apps are secretly Chromium. Komai isn't.
Built in Rust, C++, and QML: fancy words for starting fast and staying out of your RAM.
No Electron, no fan spinning up because you opened a chat app.
Desktop-first, not a stretched phone app. Room tabs across the top and readable text.
Works for grandma and power users alike - not dumbed down & not buried in complexity.
10+ themes tuned for real contrast (WCAG AA), plus any you write yourself.
It all lives in plain YAML, so set it up once and carry that file to every machine you own.
Drag across a run of messages, Ctrl-click a few, or grab them from the keyboard, then copy, reply, forward, or delete the lot in one move. The clean way to tidy a channel or lift a stack of quotes from a busy room, without death by right-click.
Komai speaks MCP, ships CLI commands, and answers on D-Bus, so scripts and other programs on your machine can read and send messages through it.
That's a real script in the screenshot, posting into a room over the API.
Element Call is wired right into Komai: end-to-end encrypted MatrixRTC calls, one-on-one or a whole room piling in, with no separate app to launch.
The older legacy 1:1 calls from nheko are still there too, off by default.
Element Call needs server support. Your homeserver has to run a MatrixRTC backend (LiveKit plus lk-jwt-service), or the call screen loads and never connects.
The room directory searches the wider Matrix network through matrixrooms.info, the public room index etke.cc builds and runs.
Filter by name, topic, or how large a room is, and actually find your people instead of trading room addresses in a DM.
The things you expect from a Matrix client, done properly.
Encrypted messaging on the Rust matrix-sdk. Device verification and key backup are built in.
Replies, Discord-style threads, and forwarding a message on to another room.
View images and play audio and video in the app, without bouncing out to another window.
Long-press Space to dictate straight into the composer, via any OpenAI-compatible backend.
Multi-language checking that runs on your machine and picks up your system dictionaries.
Your own emoji, with CLDR
keyword search, so typing :whiskey finds π₯.
EXIF, IPTC, and XMP data is stripped from images before upload, on by default.
Keep separate accounts in separate profiles and switch between them cleanly.
Little touches like rain and thunder over a message when the moment calls for it.
10+ built-in themes tuned for WCAG AA contrast, plus themes you write yourself.
Komai probably speaks your language already.
A keyboard-driven main workflow. Shortcuts come in both plain and Vim-style throughout.
Free, open source, and always the current build. Pick your platform.
The AppImage needs FUSE 2. If it refuses to start,
that's usually the missing piece: sudo apt install libfuse2 on Debian or Ubuntu,
fuse2 on Arch.
komai.exeNot code-signed yet, so Windows throws a SmartScreen warning on first launch. Click More info, then Run anyway, and you're in.
No auto-update yet, so each new version is a fresh download.
komai.app into ApplicationsNot signed or notarized yet, so Gatekeeper gets nervous on first launch. On macOS 13 and 14, right-click the app and hit Open. On 15 and up, open it once, then approve it under System Settings, Privacy & Security, Open Anyway.
Apple Silicon only for now, and no auto-update yet either.
Want an older version, a checksum to verify against, or a URL to pin in your own scripts? It's all on the GitHub releases page.
Komai is built by the team at etke.cc, on the matrix-rust-sdk, and it began as a fork of nheko by the Nheko-Reborn team (thanks, folks).
The room search inside it runs on matrixrooms.info, the Matrix room index etke.cc also maintains.
Like the client but would rather not babysit a homeserver? The same crew runs managed Matrix hosting at etke.cc.