Murmur

murmur.priet.us — A native, opinionated IRC client. Built in Rust with iced.

Murmur is a quiet client. Joins, parts, and noise fade into the background; conversation gets the foreground. Subtle by default, with /dimm for focus mode, inline media previews, tab-complete, command palette (⌘K), built-in emoji picker, per-channel logs, and SASL PLAIN / EXTERNAL (CertFP).

Status

Alpha. Tested on macOS. Linux/Windows builds produced by CI but not heavily tested yet.

Interface

• Soft-dark palette by default, plus midnight, daylight, and solar themes (/theme <name>).
• Tile-style sidebar with per-row hover/select animations (EaseOutBack 220ms) and channel-switch crossfade.
• Sidebar / members panes are toggleable with ‹ / › chevrons. Widths auto-fit the longest channel and nick.
• Channel activity sparkline — hover a channel for ≥5s to see a popup with a 2h sparkline (24 buckets × 5min) and a "N msgs · last Xmin" summary.
• Per-network &status buffer for server output, WHOIS replies, and standard replies.

Reading

• Message grouping — consecutive messages from the same nick within 5 min collapse to a single header.
• Subtle join/part lines at ~35% opacity, smaller font, no nick column. /hidejoins removes them entirely for the current channel.
• /dimm (no args) — per-channel focus mode; non-mentions render at 30% opacity.
• /dimm <nick> — global soft-ignore at 15% opacity. /ignore is the hard equivalent.
• Read-marker line (── new ──) above the first unread when the channel was not focused. Syncs to the server via draft/read-marker so it survives across devices.
• Smart unread digest — when a backgrounded channel accumulates ≥5 unreads, the top of the buffer shows ↓ N new messages · M mentions · top: nick (X), nick (Y), nick (Z) · × dismiss before the read marker.
• Inline media previews — images render inline (max 480×360); audio/video and other files as a sober card; URL errors as a faint footer.
• Link unfurling — OpenGraph / Twitter Cards / <title> fallback parsed and rendered as a card with title, description, host, and embedded image. /unfurl on|off|toggle per channel.
• +draft/reply threading — right-click → "↳ Reply" sets a composer chip; sent messages tag +draft/reply. Renders a mini-quote above the body, or a compact ↳ prefix when the parent is the message immediately above.
• Reactions — right-click → "React" or /react <emoji> adds a +draft/react TAGMSG; reactions render as grouped badges under the message.
• In-buffer search (⌘F) — case-insensitive substring with accent-tinted highlights and a match counter.

Composer

• Tab autocomplete — nicks and slash commands; cycles on repeated tab. Smart : vs suffix depending on position.
• Command palette (⌘K) — fuzzy channel jump + slash command runner.
• Emoji picker — searchable, curated set with category filters; inserts at cursor.
• draft/multiline — paste a multi-line block and send as one BATCH message.
• draft/typing — sends +typing=active while you type; observes inbound and renders "X is typing…" / "N others are typing…" above the input.
• File upload — paperclip button (or drag-and-drop) uploads via either the network's FILEHOST or a custom HTTP endpoint (configured under [upload.custom]).

Sidebar — buddies & presence

• MONITOR-backed buddy list under the channel list. Online buddies get an accent dot; offline are dim; unknown render with a faint ring.
• /monitor add|del|list|clear (alias /buddy) — manage per-network buddies. Persisted to config.
• Right-click any member → "Add buddy" / "Remove buddy" for quick toggling.
• Native notification on offline → online transition (unless you're already viewing that DM).

Search

• ⌘F — in-buffer search overlay (current channel only).
• ⌘⇧F — global FTS5 backlog search across every network and channel you've ever received a message in. Live-indexed via SQLite (<config>/index.db) with unicode61 diacritic-insensitive tokenization (sé matches se). Snippet highlights, click → jump to that channel.

Privacy & notes

• ⌘⇧P — privacy mode. Replaces every nick in the UI with a stable mask (u·a3f derived from a session-independent hash, so threads stay readable). Affects chat nick column, members, buddies, DM names, reply quotes, and even nicks baked into system lines (→ teraflops joined) or referenced in message bodies (nick: …). Topics and your own message bodies are left as-is. An accent-tinted PRIVACY pill in the chat header tells you it's on.
• Private notes per nick — right-click any member → "Add note…" opens an inline editor. Saved notes show as a small accent dot on the member row and a tooltip with the full text when hovering. Stored per-network in your config TOML.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌘K / Ctrl+K	Command palette (channel jump + slash commands)
⌘F / Ctrl+F	Search in current channel
⌘⇧F / Ctrl+Shift+F	Global backlog search
⌘⇧P / Ctrl+Shift+P	Toggle privacy mode
⌘, / Ctrl+,	Open settings
⌘W / Ctrl+W	Close current buffer
Tab	Autocomplete nick or slash command
↑ / ↓	Walk input history
Esc	Close the top-most overlay (search, palette, settings, picker, reply draft)

Slash commands

/join /part /nick /me /msg /query /away /back /whois /topic /clear /kick /mode /op /deop /voice /devoice /ban /unban /invite /ignore /unignore /ignores /dimm /hidejoins /setname /history /delete /react /monitor /unfurl /raw (alias /quote) /theme /config /settings /server /connect /disconnect /close /logs /msgid /caps /ping /ctcp

Run ⌘K then / for one-line hints on each.

IRCv3 support

Murmur attempts to establish the following IRCv3 capabilities with the server while connecting:

Identity & presence

• account-tag — every message carries the sender's services account
• extended-join — JOIN lines show services account when present
• account-notify — see when other users log in/out of NickServ
• away-notify — away users render dimmed in the member list
• chghost — host/ident changes shown in place, no fake quit/join
• echo-message — your own messages get a server-assigned msgid for editing/reacting
• setname — change your realname mid-session with /setname <new realname>

Member list enrichment

• multi-prefix — every channel prefix shown (@+nick, not just the highest)
• userhost-in-names — ident@host captured from NAMES for tooltips/whois

Protocol plumbing

• message-tags + server-time + batch — IRCv3 message metadata + tagged batches
• invite-notify — channel ops see who's being invited
• cap-notify — react to CAP NEW / CAP DEL mid-session (bouncer network attach/detach)
• labeled-response — response correlation for parallel commands
• sts — Strict Transport Security, persists per host; forces TLS+port on next connect

Authentication

• SASL PLAIN (password)
• SASL EXTERNAL (CertFP — auto-selected when client_cert_path is set)
• draft/sasl-ir — initial response on the first AUTHENTICATE line, skips the + challenge roundtrip

History & catch-up

• draft/chathistory — server-side scrollback on channel attach (LATEST)
• draft/chathistory TARGETS subcommand — /history shows active conversations
• draft/event-playback — soju/bouncer replays joins/parts/nicks alongside PRIVMSGs in chathistory
• IRCv3 standard replies (FAIL / WARN / NOTE) — rendered uniformly in the status buffer
• RPL_ISUPPORT (005) parser — uses MODES= for op-bulk chunking, CHANTYPES= for /join validation

Modern drafts

• draft/typing — "X is typing…" indicator below the input; sends +typing=active while you type
• draft/multiline — receives BATCH multiline as a single message with line breaks
• draft/read-marker — sends MARKREAD when you focus a channel
• draft/message-redaction — /delete removes your last message (or /delete <msgid>); incoming REDACTs render as tombstones
• +draft/react — /react <emoji> reacts to the latest message; reactions render as grouped badges

Server support varies — Ergo and Soju cover the most ground; Libera supports identity/presence/history but not the editing/redaction drafts.

Build from source

cargo build --release

On Linux you'll need a few system packages. E.g., on Debian (and derivatives):

sudo apt-get install -y libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev pkg-config

The first run writes a commented config template to:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/murmur/config.toml
• Linux: ~/.config/murmur/config.toml
• Windows: %APPDATA%\murmur\config.toml

Edit nickname and server, restart, and you're in!

Pre-built binaries

See the Releases page.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.