Lightning is a desktop messenger for Matrix, the open network for secure, decentralised communication. Sign in to any homeserver, or to several accounts at once, and reach people wherever their account lives.
Conversations are organised into Spaces, rooms and threads. Send rich text, pictures, files, voice messages, polls, reactions and custom emoji, and find something you sent months ago without scrolling back to it.
Private rooms are end-to-end encrypted throughout: verify your other devices by comparing emoji, restore your keys from backup, and search even your encrypted rooms with an index that never leaves this computer.
Group voice calls and screen sharing run in the room itself.
A release made mostly of the interface: a sustained accessibility and layout pass that turned dozens of "needs looking at" observations into fixed defects, a Spaces rail you can now shape to taste, and a first- class NixOS package contributed from outside the project. Nothing in the messaging, calling or encryption contracts changed; this is the release that makes what was already there legible, reachable and correctly drawn.
