KDE’s NeoChat Matrix Client Gets New Login Page, Multimodal Mode, and Message Editing

NeoChat

KDE’s NeoChat chat client supporting the Matrix open standard and communication protocol for real-time and decentralized communication received its first major update with new features and improvements.

Introduced two months ago as part of KDE’s first Apps update in 2021, NeoChat is a Matrix chat client supported on both desktop and mobile and that comes with a neat set of features, including a built-in image editor, support for sending and accepting invitations, the ability to remember the last room you’ve joined, support for showing the last read message, as well as read markers.

The first major update is out now, as developer Carl Schwan reports on his blog, enhancing NeoChat with more super powers, including a new multimodal mode that lets you view and interact with multiple chat rooms simultaneously by opening them in new windows, and the ability to edit messages and also display in the chat if a message has been edited.

In addition, NeoChat now features a brand-new login screen capable of automatically detecting the Matrix server’s configuration based on your Matrix ID so you can login to servers that require Single Sign On (SSO), such as Mozilla’s Element server or Fedora’s forthcoming Matrix instance.

“Servers that require agreeing to the TOS before usage are correctly detected now and redirect to their TOS webpage, allowing the user to agree to them instead of silently failing to load the account,” explains Carl Schwan.

Among other changes, this first major update to NeoChat adds support for displaying stickers, better integration with the Plasma desktop environment by showing the number of unread messages in the Plasma Taskbar, as well as new commands including /shrug/lenny/rainbowme/join/invite/part/ignore, and /unignore.

If you’re using the latest KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment on your GNU/Linux distribution, most probably you’ll be able to install the NeoChat 1.1.1 release from the software repositories. If that’s not the case, you can download NeoChat 1.1.1 as Flatpak or AppImage universal package. NeoChat also works on Android.

Image credits: Carl Schwan

Last updated 3 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com