A cross-platform third-party Discord client built with Qt6 and C++23. It talks to Discord directly and gives you a native desktop experience without the weight of Electron. It is designed to be fast, responsive, and easy on your hardware.

kind is not discord. If that looks familiar, you know who to thank.

• Guild and channel navigation with unread indicators, mention counts, and mute state
• Rich message rendering with markdown, embeds, attachments, reactions, stickers, replies, and custom emoji
• Interactive components including buttons, select menus, and ephemeral notices
• Direct messages with a dedicated conversation list
• Image caching with memory and disk tiers, viewport-prioritized downloads, and conditional revalidation
• SQLite message cache with read state tracking
• Account-scoped state so logs, cache, and config stay separated per account
• System keychain integration for token storage
• Gateway WebSocket with heartbeat, resume, and reconnect
• REST client with rate limit handling
• Timestamp column with configurable visibility
• Status bar with connection state
• Preferences dialog for runtime configuration
• Diagnostic tooling via kind-analyze, a log analysis suite (see tools/)

Sponsoring me on GitHub is currently the best way to get access to pre-built binaries. This is how I fund continued development.

The source is right here under GPLv3. If you can build it yourself, you are welcome to do so. See Building from Source below.

• CMake 4.0 or later
• C++23 compiler (GCC 14+, Clang 18+)
• Qt 6.10+ with the following modules: Concurrent, Core, Network, WebSockets, Sql, Widgets, Protobuf, ProtobufWellKnownTypes
• QtKeychain (qtkeychain, built with Qt6)
• protobuf (protoc compiler and development headers)
• libsecret (Linux)

These are fetched automatically via CMake's FetchContent if not found on your system:

• spdlog 1.17
• toml++ 3.4
• GoogleTest 1.17 (tests only)

Optional:

• mold linker (auto-detected, speeds up linking)
• mimalloc or jemalloc (custom allocator, see CMake options)

Install the system dependencies for your distribution. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev libsecret-1-dev \
  libgl1-mesa-dev libxkbcommon-dev mold

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S protobuf libsecret mold

Qt 6.10 is not yet in most distro repos. You may need to install it from the Qt installer or build it yourself. QtKeychain must also be built against your Qt6 installation if not packaged.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

The binary lands at build/src/gui/kind-gui.

ctest --test-dir build

I am not accepting pull requests at this time. The codebase is still maturing and I have a specific vision for its architecture and quality that I need to get right before outside contributions make sense. Once I am confident in the foundation, I will open it up.

If you find a bug or have a suggestion, issues are welcome.

This project is built with AI assistance. All of it. I set the architecture, make design decisions, define quality standards, and evaluate the result. The AI writes code to a standard I enforce through testing, MVC compliance, logging, and refusing to accept anything that blocks the UI or cuts corners.

I have more to say about this if you are interested.

GNU General Public License v3.0