Aether

A beautiful, fast, native desktop client for Stoat — the best open-source, self-hosted alternative to Discord.

Status: Under active development. Not yet feature-complete.

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About

Aether is built with Qt 6 and QML, targeting a fully native experience on Windows, macOS, and Linux from day one. It communicates with a self-hosted Stoat backend over its HTTP/WebSocket API.

Key properties:

• Native, GPU-accelerated UI via Qt Quick
• Clean separation between QML frontend and C++ backend layer
• AGPL-3.0 licensed — free as in freedom

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Requirements

Dependency	Minimum version
Qt	6.8
CMake	3.28
Ninja	1.11
C++ compiler	C++20 support (GCC 13, Clang 16, MSVC 2022)

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Building (Linux)

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/aether-client/aether.git
cd aether

# 2. Configure
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

# 3. Build
cmake --build build --parallel

# 4. Run
./build/aether

Debug build

cmake -S . -B build-debug -G Ninja \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

cmake --build build-debug --parallel
./build-debug/aether

With a custom Qt installation

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja \
      -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/Qt/6.8.0/gcc_64

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Project structure

aether/
├── CMakeLists.txt        # Root build configuration
├── cmake/                # Future CMake helpers
├── resources/
│   └── icons/            # Application icons
└── src/
    ├── CMakeLists.txt    # Executable target
    ├── main.cpp          # Application entry point
    ├── qml/              # QML UI layer (module URI: Aether)
    │   ├── main.qml
    │   └── components/   # Reusable QML components
    └── cpp/              # C++ backend modules (coming soon)

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License

Copyright (C) 2026 Aether Contributors

Aether is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for the full text.