Yapfast 0.2.0 is out

This is everything since 0.1.0 came out on October 16, 140 commits, five of them pull requests from three people who aren't me. Downloads are on the releases page, as always, and if you'd rather watch than read, here's the 40 second version (sound on, it's a banger :D)

Server settings

Server Settings are here, from a server's menu or its name at the top: Server Profile, Engagement, Boost Perks, Roles, Emoji, Stickers, Safety Setup, Audit Log, Bans, Members and Invites, plus Delete Server and Transfer Ownership for your own servers. You see the pages your roles let you use (no peeking at the Audit Log without the permission, sorry :p). Channels and categories have settings of their own too, permissions included. A few pages aren't there yet, like the Soundboard, Integrations, AutoMod and Onboarding, and emoji upload takes your picture as it is, without Discord's Emoji Studio.

Games

pkejval's biggest pull request (#10) taught Yapfast to see what you're playing and show it on your profile. It knows the almost 25,000 games on Discord's own list, whatever Steam has installed and any custom game you add, Wine and Proton games included. Proton itself doesn't count, though; a slow Proton launch used to show you playing "Steam Linux Runtime 3.0 (sniper)", great game, 10/10 :p

On Linux, games and apps that send Rich Presence show their details, pictures and buttons too, without arRPC or any other bridge. Windows only gets the detection for now. It all follows your account's own game sharing setting, so if you turned it off in Discord, it's off here too (Settings → Game activity).

Other people's profiles show what they're up to as well, like the game they're in and for how long, or the Spotify song they're listening to, which you can click to open on Spotify.

Game detection held 5.2 MiB when it came in, which is a LOT when Yapfast's whole heap is usually about 8–15.

Before merging it, I got it down to 155 KiB, by keeping only a short fingerprint of each game's program name in memory and reading the full list from disk only for programs that are actually running.

An AppImage and an Arch package

Linux finally has packages, so no more building it yourself first :D The AppImage runs on anything with glibc 2.39 or newer, like Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, Debian 13 and up, and uses your own graphics driver, Mesa or NVIDIA. It adds itself to your app menu, so it gets its proper icon on Wayland (#31). Arch gets a package with every release, and pepopepopepo wrote the PKGBUILD if you'd rather build it yourself (#2). With Nix, it's nix profile add github:yapfast/yapfast#yapfast.

Polls, forwards and forums

Polls work now. You can vote, watch the votes come in, end your own early, and make new ones from the composer's + menu. You can forward messages too, as real Discord forwards, to up to five conversations at once.

Forums work now too, with each post as a card showing its tags, first message, top reaction and a thumbnail, and you can post in them.

Encrypted on disk

Yapfast keeps your account, messages, profiles and favorite GIFs on disk, so it can show them before Discord answers. Until now that was plain JSON that only your login on the computer could read, which still meant a backup or anyone reading your disk could see your DMs. It's all encrypted now, and so are the previews of the pictures and links people send you. Avatars, banners, emoji and stickers stay as they are, since they're public on Discord anyway.

The key sits in your system's credential store next to your Discord token, so there's nothing new to type, and unlinking your account deletes it along with the files. The first start after updating deletes the old unencrypted files, so things load from Discord once more.

Push to talk

It's in Settings → Voice & video → Input mode. Pick a key (any key; like Discord, there's no default), hold it to talk, and it keeps working while a game or any other app has the focus, on Wayland, X11 and Windows. Sway is the exception (sorry sway people :( ), since it doesn't let apps listen for keys like that, so there it only works while Yapfast is in front, and settings tell you so. I haven't tried it on a real Wayland desktop or real Windows yet, only in test setups, so if it does something dumb, tell me.

Long calls going choppy

Calls used to go choppy and laggy about half an hour in. Every sound card keeps time on its own clock, and none of them run at quite the same speed as your computer's; mine is off by 48 microseconds a second, which adds up to about 86 ms every half an hour. Yapfast didn't make up for that, so after a while someone's audio would either run dry or pile up.

Now Yapfast waits for audio that comes in late instead of throwing it away, and when a backlog builds up, it skips a quiet moment to catch up. In a simulated call with clocks drifting way faster than real ones do, the packets thrown away for coming late went from 257 to 0. Speakers whose clock runs fast can still hiccup now and then, so if your calls still go choppy after an hour, please tell me.

Joining servers

You can join servers now, from the + under your server list or by clicking an invite link in chat. Yapfast shows you the server first and waits for you to click Join. If the server has a form for new members, like rules to accept, you still fill that in on Discord's website for now..

In Community servers with Show All Channels turned off, the channel list shows only the channels you follow (#5), and Browse channels lets you pick them. You can mark a whole folder read (#19), and join and leave threads from their menus.

Noise, tiles and the rest of calls

At Full strength, noise suppression ate giggles and breathy laughs, so Medium is the default now (laughing is allowed again :D). It let 47–66% of the giggles I tested through, against 0–31% at Full, without letting through any more typing or clicks. If you had 0.1.0, you're probably still on Full; it's under Settings → Voice & video → Noise suppression strength.

Mouse clicks in your pauses don't open the voice gate anymore (0 of 33 recorded clicks did, against 7 before), and clicks while you're talking get turned down by a new declicker, which is still an experiment but on by default. The first second or two after you'd been quiet also used to go missing for everyone hearing you, and doesn't anymore.

Click someone's tile in a call to make it big, and double click it for full screen (#21). A stream you watch now shows in the streamer's tile instead of covering everyone else, and while you're off reading another channel, a camera from the call stays in the corner. Streams you share show up on Discord's iOS app now too, instead of a black rectangle.

Voice channels have their text chat now, thanks to pkejval (#12). The server you're in a call on gets a green speaker on its icon, your avatar in the bottom left gets a green ring while you talk, and the friends list shows which voice channel a friend is in, with a click taking you there.

New icons

The icons are filled now, like Discord's, instead of thin lines. Most come from the Bold style of Solar by 480 Design, and the few it doesn't have are adapted from it or drawn to match, like the slashed "off" icons and the spool for threads. Checks, crosses, arrows and the title bar buttons stay as lines. All together they're 7 KB bigger than the old ones (the horror :p).

Profiles show up right away

A profile card used to show only what the member list knew until Discord answered. Yapfast now keeps the last 500 profiles you opened (1–5 KB each), so a card you open again shows right away, banner included, and Discord's answer replaces it once it comes in. If Discord doesn't answer at all, you still get the saved one.

Chat

Discord's own notices and lots of bot messages used to show up empty, just a name and a time (#25). They show as cards now, though buttons that need the bot are greyed out until Yapfast can talk to apps.

Smaller stuff, in no particular order:

• Middle click a list to autoscroll it, like in a browser (#38).
• Message times say "Yesterday at 21:41", or the date for older ones.
• Mentions show in color while you type them, and @everyone and @here look like mentions too.
• A message's menu has Copy selection and Copy Link, and right clicking a message's text opens it.
• A channel only counts as read once you've scrolled down to its newest message (#28).
• Deleted messages stay deleted, and reactions that lots of people add at once show up right away.
• Message someone right from their profile card, and edit your own profile on the card itself.
• The window opens at the size you left it, and on Windows where you left it.
• Opening Yapfast while it's already running brings up the window you have instead of starting a second one (#34). Settings → Advanced → Allow multiple windows gets you the old way.
• Settings open as a card over the window, like Discord's, so a call keeps playing behind them, and server and channel settings open the same way.
• Drag channels and categories to move them in the channel list, if you have Manage Channels.
• A thread open beside its channel takes files too, from its +, a paste or a drop on it.
• While you're live, the share button switches to another screen or window without ending the stream.
• New sounds for when someone in the call goes live or ends their stream, each with its own volume in settings.
• Images don't get stuck on their previews anymore after your network changes or the computer sleeps.
• You can sign in with a token instead of the QR code.
• Two neighboring categories with the same name don't merge into one anymore.
• Member lists don't show you online while you're invisible (#8).
• Delete shows on other people's messages when you're allowed to delete them, and a timeout takes away what it takes away in Discord.

The Linux desktop

On KDE, GNOME and the other desktops that put a title bar on every window, Yapfast draws its own now, like Discord does (#35). Tiling ones like Hyprland, sway and niri stay as they were, and Settings → Appearance → Use the system title bar switches it either way.

Emoji show up on Fedora now, where reactions used to be blank (#32), and opening the window from the tray on Wayland asks the desktop to bring it forward, thanks to pkejval (#13).

Windows

Most of this works on Windows too, except Rich Presence and the title bar. Push to talk works there while you're in a game, unless the game runs as administrator, which can hide its keys from Yapfast (Discord's app has the same problem). I've only tested the Windows side under Wine so far.

Nightly builds

yutaplug set up nightly builds (#16), so you can try what's on main without building it yourself (and find my bugs before everyone else does :p). They're on the releases page, marked Pre-release, with the AppImage, the Arch package and the Windows ZIP (no installer in those yet).

Not there yet

• Media channels, the soundboard, and Activities (the apps you start inside a call).
• Making and changing server folders.
• A list of the people you blocked, and leaving a group DM.
• Animated custom emoji in messages, which show their first frame.
• Buttons and menus that need a bot.
• Rich Presence on Windows.
• Captchas, sort of. If Discord asks for one, Yapfast opens it in your browser, but I still haven't hit one against real Discord.
• macOS, since I still don't have a Mac to test on, sorry :(

For those, it's Discord in a browser for now..

Ten of the fixes above started as someone's issue, so thank you, and keep them coming, on the Discord server or in an issue.

Thanks for reading, and stay blazingly fast <3