Komai: a fine Matrix chat app you can get to love

https://etke.cc/blog/introducing-komai

by anotherevan • 3 months ago

59 42 3 months ago

etke.cc

aselimov32• 3 months ago

This looks very ugly compared to other matrix clients

unbolted3032• 3 months ago

This may be a matter of taste, because I quite like the approach the ekte team have taken.

To my eye, the app is clean and minimal and shows me everything I need easily.

aselimov32• 3 months ago

Fair enough!

realityfactchex• 3 months ago

It's great that etke.cc chose to build on nheko (a very fast Matrix client) and put in many thoughtful upgrades.

I really hope Komai start getting built for macOS.

mrsssnake3• 3 months ago

While I could understand some AI assistance, I just cannot look at such README with clearly sloppy too detailed nonsense app icon and eyesore emoji vomit:

https://github.com/etkecc/komai

unlicensed• 3 months ago

It is utterly annoying to see emojis pollute information presented in a technical manner. It’s the hallmark of generated technical slop and seems to appeal to the perpetual resume polishers found on LinkedIn.

nickserv2• 3 months ago

A lot of younger developers seem to really like this. Not a big fan personally, but you gotta live with the times I suppose.

I do draw the line when they start putting them in console outputs though.

spantaleev6• 3 months ago

This is a FOSS project with absolutely no funding.

There's no designer around to do a professional SVG logo, so we make use of what's there - AI to generate the (raster image) icon and then some tools to turn that into an SVG.

It turned out a little rough around some edges, but still good enough, I think. If anyone would like to polish it up, PRs are most welcome!

Icons may be a matter of taste. This one may be too detailed, but still scales well to small sizes. For now, I don't see why we should follow everyone else and go with an overly-simplistic icon.

As for the README emoji vomit: this may be a matter of taste as well. I find it makes it easier to scan through things, and I can assure you that each point on the README has been given much though and review by a human. Reducing it to "emoji vomit" is going too far.

Disclosure: I've been working on this Matrix chat app in my spare time over the past few months.

mrsssnake3• 3 months ago

I do appreciate doing unpaid volunteer work. My comment sounds clingy, not is not a demand more of a pointing out.

Icon can really be a generic SVG taken from some CC stock website, if there is no time for anything else, would look much better. Getting rid of emoji vomit is one prompt away. I might do a PR if I find free five minutes.

stryan• 3 months ago

Having the core of your app be written in languages you self-admittedly don't understand is a bold move. I've been a big fan of the ansible-matrix playbooks for a while now so I'm willing to see this play out, but it doesn't fill me with confidence.

hperrin• 3 months ago

AI slop app.

fatliverfreddy• 3 months ago

You can teach a person to write programs. You can't teach good taste.

nickserv2• 3 months ago

Wow, so much negativity, when the app scores really high on things that are supposed to be important here:

* Desktop first, no electron crap

* Open source and free

* Linux first

* Subjective, but to me it looks clean

If getting all that means using some AI vibe code, that's fine by me. Who isn't these days anyway? (Be honest!)

Anyway I hope the project is successful, more choice and competition in Matrix clients is a good thing.

Now if only they can fix video calls...

invalidSyntax• 3 months ago

Vibe coding isn't bad. It's those people who do all there coding(?) with it and post it like it's there creation is the problem.

LoganDark2• 3 months ago

Who cares if they used AI assistance? Vision is theirs, prompting is theirs, guidance is theirs, verification and iteration and feedback and so on is theirs. It's not like they zero-shot "make a Matrix client for Linux" and then just posted that with zero processing, review, testing, or anything. Sheesh.

rolymath• 3 months ago

This applies to all software. You didn't make the monitor your app is being displayed on. Stop taking credit for the compiler that made your code runnable, etc.

blurbleblurble• 3 months ago

People are afraid and taking it out on others

Arcuru• 3 months ago

It's because they:

1. Forked an existing app that has all the features you listed.

2. Admit they don't really know the language and tech it uses.

3. Said upstream was too slow, but I don't see any(?) PRs from them on upstream besides the 2 that they list in the post. Their fork appears to have an extra 3,000 commits.

I'm not super against them doing this, but it's pretty easy to see why people don't like it. Hell, this is the same group that upgraded one of my side-projects from a few years ago and improved it into their 'baibot' matrix bot, so I wish them all the best. I like people making money from OSS, more power to them.

spantaleev6• 3 months ago

Your Rust-based AI chatbot (https://github.com/arcuru/chaz) was an inspiration!

It made me think: we don't have to suffer the brokenness of the old bot (https://github.com/matrixgpt/matrix-chatgpt-bot) anymore. Still, I wanted something more thread-based and more powerful than what you had built.. and I wanted a playground to learn some Rust.

To clarify for anyone that might get confused: baibot (https://github.com/etkecc/baibot) is not based on any of the chaz code, nor on the matrix-chatgpt-bot code. It's completely manually-built / independently-built (in Rust), by me, over multiple months of unpaid FOSS work.

azertify• 3 months ago

I really like the Matrix ecosystem, and this client seems like a cool addition, but how are posts like this with a load of AI generated prose getting on the front page?

I can't say how frustrating it is to be midway through reading something and realise there's no human author.

spantaleev6• 3 months ago

While AI was used for writing the code and large parts of the text (including in the blog post), I can assure you there's been a human author dedicating many days and sleepless nights on this alongside the AI.

Especially when it comes to the blog post, it's been human-reviewed and tweaked many times.

Still, if you don't like the content, it probably doesn't matter that there had been a human dedicating too much of his free time on this side project.

Source: the human author is me.

corndoge• 3 months ago

I love matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and use it for my homeservers.

I also bounced off this piece around halfway through when I realized it was mixed AI/human content. I can read AI output anytime I want. Show me your true self! :)

Thanks for your work. Appreciate you!

TonyStr• 3 months ago

midway through reading something

Maybe it's because I scrolled down before reading, but I could instantly tell this entire text was AI slop from the massive overuse of emojis and bullet points.

solarkraft2• 3 months ago

You let yourself be blinded. There’s nothing slop about this. Every sentence is crisp and meaningful.

nor0x• 3 months ago

love that pricing page

ushimitsudoki• 3 months ago

Today’s lesson learned:

When Show-ing your app on HN:

- Don't mention "vibe coding."

- Stay away from emojis.

Personally, I believe that a programmer's true skill today lies in how effectively they can leverage AI, and I’m all-in on vibe coding myself. But seeing the reaction here, I’m starting to think I should have thought twice before sharing my app on HN.

Even this post was translated by AI... I guess that’s probably a strike three, isn't it?

8fingerlouie3• 3 months ago

Everybody is AI coding these days, and if you're not, you may find yourself out of a job soon.

You still need skilled engineers to "operate" the AIs and to verify the results, but why on earth would you spend 3 weeks coding something by hand that Codex or Claude can spit out in a couple of hours.

For reference, at my employer we have so far in 2026 (1500+ developers) created 75% more code by AI this year compared to all of last year. Features are being delivered faster than ever, in a quality as good or better than before. As another advantage, we can now use skills to guarantee that the code that is created follows best practices, architecture patters, local governance and compliance. The "big thing" right now for us is providing guardrails and governance for agentic AI.

bayarearefugee• 3 months ago

we can now use skills to guarantee that the code that is created follows best practices, architecture patters, local governance and compliance.

It is terrifying that any working software developer believes this is true.

LLMs are useful tools. But regardless of your inputs they guarantee nothing, ever.

solarkraft2• 3 months ago

I’m glad that some people in the FOSS community are embracing AI assistance.

It’s here and we need to write software. Let’s celebrate that it lets us do it better!

8fingerlouie3• 3 months ago

C++ seems like an odd choice for developing desktop apps in 2026, but I guess if it works, it works.

danielspace23• 3 months ago

Personally, I think the client looks cool, but the problem with Matrix has never been client-side, it's more like the entire protocol is bad at doing what it aims to do.

beastafk• 3 months ago

I have been using it for the last 2 days, it feels blazing fast and I like all the appearance customization options

nohell• 3 months ago

What an awful UI.

- Microsoft Teams icons. Really??? - Padding everywhere - Feels like a machine control panel, not a chat app - Double sidebars? Why?

This feels like a uTox clone. Not good in 2026. Even Teams has a significantly better interface.

spantaleev6• 3 months ago

The icons are not from Microsoft Teams. It's the Fluent System Icons (https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui-system-icons) free iconset by Microsoft, which Nheko (Komai's predecessor) also used and we continue to use. Because we found this iconset lacking in certain aspects, in Komai we also supplement it with Font Awesome.

Why double sidebars? Because Nheko established this pattern and I still think it's a good idea. On the desktop there's usually plenty of horizontal space to comfortably show everything without having to hide things away and require you to click multiple times. Still, both sidebars are collapsible to "just icons" for people who need the extra space.

In fact, most Matrix apps (Element, Discord, ..) have the same sort of "double sidebar" layout, but usually collapse the left-most sidebar to "icons only" by default. I think this makes it hard for new users to learn (icons are cryptic without a label) and there's no good reason to do it when you have enough horizontal space.

As for the padding, whether the defaults look good probably depends on screen size and personal preference. Komai is very configurable. There's a "Density" setting which offers 3 different options ("Spacious", "Compact" and "Dense"). "Spacious" is the default one, because it provides better ergonomics due to larger hit targets. Accessibility is important, but users who find the default padding too much can adjust it.

Disclosure: I've been working on Komai in my spare time for a few months now.

Komai: a fine Matrix chat app you can get to love

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