# madre
madre is a native Matrix client for the GNOME desktop, written in Rust with GTK 4 and libadwaita on top of matrix-rust-sdk. Your spaces, rooms and direct messages sit in one window that follows GNOME’s look and feel, in light and dark, from a wide desktop layout down to a phone-sized one. It is under active development and has not reached v1 yet.
The idea is that nothing about using Matrix should feel like using a web app. A spaces rail on the left with nested categories inside each space, a Home view that collects your direct messages, invites and rooms that don’t belong to a space, unread and mention counts that add up to the space they belong to. And the whole conversation is there: markdown, replies, edits, reactions, threads, pinned messages, polls, mentions, attachments, read receipts and typing indicators. Messages that fail to send queue up for retry instead of disappearing.
Encryption is on by default, the way it should be: end-to-end encryption, cross-signing, device verification and key backup with a recovery key, so a new device can still read your older messages. Search in encrypted rooms runs on your device against an encrypted local index, and older history gets filled in in the background, one room at a time. Your session and cache passphrase live in the desktop keyring, not in a plaintext settings file.
It is also built for the keyboard: Ctrl+K jumps to any room or person, and the full shortcut list is one Ctrl+? away. Light, dark or system style, a choice of accent colors, cozy or compact message rows, desktop notifications, background sync and start on login are all yours to adjust.
Install it from the signed Salix Flatpak repository, with stable builds for x86_64 and ARM64, or grab a bundle from the releases. There is a separately installable nightly that keeps its own data and sign-in, so it can run next to the stable app. If you want to poke at it, the source is on the forge and there’s a #madre:salix.host room — I’m not accepting contributions, but issues are very welcome.
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