RRChat — A TUI Reticulum Relay Chat Client

Jul 31, 2026 - ⧖ 2.0 min
🗒️

📡 "IRC never died. It went off-grid." RRChat — end-to-end encrypted chat channels riding the Reticulum mesh, no ISP, no server, no masters.

🚀 RRChat

RRChat is an RRC (Reticulum Relay Chat) client — an IRC-like chat experience built on top of the Reticulum decentralized mesh network, fully end-to-end encrypted.

No towers, no telco, no corporate uplink. RRChat talks to an already-running Reticulum-compatible daemon (rnsd, lnsd, or any compliant implementation), speaks RRC to a hub, and hands you IRC-style channels over the mesh. Built in Rust, for hackers who never left the terminal.

⌨️ Keybindings

RRChat mimics iamb's keybindings — it's built on the same modalkit / modalkit-ratatui vim-modal framework iamb uses, so most of iamb's keybinding documentation applies here too.

Key Action
i enter insert mode (compose a message)
Esc back to normal mode
Enter send message / select item in a list
j / k move down / up (scrollback, lists)
Ctrl-W m toggle focus between scrollback and the message bar
:discover list discovered hubs
:channels list channels on the connected hub
:join <room> join a channel
:part <room> leave a channel
:members list the focused pane's channel member list
:close / :q close window / quit
:vertical / :horizontal / :aboveleft / :belowright tile the next command instead of replacing the current window

See iamb's documentation for the rest.

💻 Installation

Build from source:

cargo build --release

Config, hubs, identity, and logs live under the standard XDG paths:

  • ~/.config/rrchat/Config.toml — nickname, log level.
  • ~/.config/rrchat/RRC.toml — hubs to connect to (destination hash + name).
  • ~/.local/share/rrchat/ — your Reticulum identity and room bookmarks.
  • ~/.cache/rrchat/rrchat.log — logs.

RRChat isn't packaged yet — once the project is more mature it'll be published to crates.io and Gentoo overlays.

🌐 Connecting to a hub

RRChat needs a running Reticulum-compatible daemon (rnsd, lnsd, or compliant implementation) and an RRC hub to point at. We run one for the Hispagatos community:

🐛 Bugs & Feature Requests

🤝 Patches

📢 Announce

🔗 Repo

👉 https://sr.ht/~rek2/RRChat/

⚖️ License

We support free software and hacker ethics: software should be free to run, study, modify, and share, and knowledge should stay open rather than gatekept.

GPLv3 — Free as in freedom, not as in beer. Use responsibly.

Grab a hub, fire up your daemon, and get on the mesh.

-- ReK2