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Quaternion

Made for Matrix

license status release PRs Welcome

Quaternion is a cross-platform desktop IM client for the Matrix protocol. This file contains general information about application usage and settings. See BUILDING.md for building instructions.

Contacts

Most of talking around Quaternion happens in the room of its parent project, Quotient: #quotient:matrix.org. #quaternion:matrix.org currently points to the old version of the Quotient room - if you ended up there, just go to the upgraded room instead (using Quaternion 0.0.9.4 or later, or Riot).

You can file issues at the project's issue tracker. If you find what looks like a security issue, please use instructions in SECURITY.md.

Download and install

The latest release (with links to cross-platform source code archives, as well as archived binaries for Windows and macOS) can be found on the GitHub Releases page.

For those who want to run the bleeding edge code, automatic builds from continuous integration pipelines can be found in the Quaternion CI repo at bintray. All these builds come with fairly recent Qt bundled. Beware: these builds may tell you obscenities in your local language, steal your smartphone and share your private photos. Jokes aside: unless you are ready for very bad and sweeping surprises, do NOT run those. Before you do, make sure you have your backups in order.

If you want to build Quaternion from sources, see BUILDING.md. Packagers are still scarce, so please step up and support your favourite system!

Requirements

Quaternion 0.0.9.5 packages on Linux need Qt version 5.9 or higher; Debian Buster, Ubuntu Bionic Beaver, Fedora 28 and OpenSUSE 15 are new enough. For Windows, macOS, AppImage, Flatpak all needed Qt libraries are included in the packages. On Windows, you need to separately install OpenSSL (see the next section).

Windows

Since we can't rely on package management on Windows, Qt libraries and a C++ runtime are packaged/installed together with Quaternion. However, OpenSSL libraries are not installed automatically because of export restrictions. Unless you already have them around (e.g., they are a part of any Qt development installation), you should install OpenSSL yourself. OpenSSL's Wiki lists a few links to OpenSSL installers. They come in different build configurations; Quaternion archives need OpenSSL made with/for Visual Studio (not MinGW), and the version should be chosen as follows:

  • If the Quaternion archive is produced before 11-08-2019 (including older CI builds and releases 0.0.9.4 and older), download OpenSSL 1.0.x; be aware that this version is only supported until the end of 2019.
  • If the archive is made on 11-08-2019 or later, download OpenSSL 1.1.x.

The deciding point is the used Qt version. To avoid any doubt, go to the folder you unpacked Quaternion to and check the version of Qt5Network.dll (it's shown in "Properties" dialog box that you can get from the context menu). If it's Qt 5.12.3 or older, you need OpenSSL 1.0; if it's newer, take OpenSSL 1.1.

macOS

You can download the latest release from GitHub.

Alternatively, you can install Quaternion from Homebrew Cask

brew cask install quaternion

Linux and others

Quaternion is packaged for many distributions, including various versions of Debian, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, as well as Arch Linux, NixOS and FreeBSD. A pretty comprehensive list can be found at Repology.

Flatpaks for Quaternion are available from Flathub. To install, use:

flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.quaternion.flatpakref

While generally working well, Flatpak support is still a bit experimental. Please file issues at https://github.com/flathub/com.github.quaternion if you believe there's a problem specific to Flatpak.

Running

Just start the executable in your most preferred way - either from the build directory or from the installed location. If you're interested in tweaking configuration beyond what's available in the UI, read the "Configuration" section further below.

Translation

Quaternion uses Lokalise.co for the translation effort. It's easy to participate: join the project at Lokalise.co, ask to add your language (either in #quotient:matrix.org or in the Lokalise project chat) and start translating! Many languages are still longing for contributors.

Configuration

The only non-trivial command-line option available so far is --locale - it allows you to override the locale Quaternion uses (an equivalent of setting LC_ALL variable on UNIX-based systems). As of version 0.0.9.3, Quaternion has no translations to other languages, so you will hardly notice the difference in messages; number and date formats will be following the setting though. Version 0.0.9.4 gains German, Polish, and Russian translations.

Quaternion stores its configuration in a way standard for Qt applications. It will read and write the configuration in the user-specific location (creating it if non-existent) and will only read the system-wide location with reasonable defaults if the configuration is nowhere to be found.

  • Linux:
    • system-wide: $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/Quotient/quaternion or /etc/xdg/Quotient/quaternion
    • user-specific: $HOME/.config/Quotient/quaternion.conf
  • macOS:
    • system-wide: /Library/Preferences/im.quotient.quaternion.plist
    • user-specific: $HOME/Library/Preferences/im.quotient.quaternion.plist
  • Windows: registry keys under
    • system-wide: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Quotient\quaternion
    • user-specific: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Quotient\quaternion

Some settings exposed in UI (Settings and View menus):

  • UI/notifications - a general setting whether Quaternion should distract the user with notifications and how.
    • none suppresses notifications entirely (rooms and messages are still hightlighted but the tray icon is muted);
    • non-intrusive allows the tray icon show notification popups;
    • intrusive (default) adds to that activation of Quaternion window (i.e. the application blinking in the task bar, or getting raised, or otherwise demands attention in an environment-specific way).
  • UI/timeline_layout - this allows to choose the timeline layout. If this is set to "xchat", Quaternion will show the author to the left of each message, in a xchat/hexchat style (this was also the only available layout on Quaternion before 0.0.9.2). Any other value will select the "default" layout, with author labels above blocks of messages.
  • UI/use_shuttle_dial - Quaternion will use a shuttle dial instead of a classic scrollbar for the timeline's vertical scrolling control. Shuttle dials usually control change velocity instead of value; in this case, moving the dial away from the neutral position increases the speed of scrolling. This is more convenient if you need to quickly move around without knowing position relative to the edges, as is the case of a Matrix timeline; however, the control is unusual and not all people like it. Shuttle scrollbar is enabled by default; set this to false (or 0) to use the classic scrollbar.
  • UI/autoload_images - whether full-size images should be loaded immediately once the message is shown on the screen. The default is to automatically load full-size images; set this to false (or 0) to disable that and only load a thumbnail initially.
  • UI/show_noop_events - set this to 1 to show state events that do not alter the state (you'll see "(repeated)" next to most of those).
  • UI/RoomsDock/tags_order - allows to alter the order of tags in the room list. The default value for this key will be set by Quaternion if it doesn't it so that you could edit it further. This is a list of tags/namespaces; .* at the end of the string means a namespace, other strings are treated as fully specified tags. E.g., the default order looks like this: m.favourite,u.*,im.quotient.direct,im.quotient.none,m.lowpriority. If a tag is not mentioned and does not fit any namespace, it will be put at the end in lexicographic order. Tags within the same namespace are also ordered lexicographically.

Settings not exposed in UI:

  • UI/condense_chat - set this to 1 to make the timeline rendered tighter, eliminating vertical gaps between messages as much as possible.
  • UI/show_author_avatars - set this to 1 (or true) to show author avatars in the timeline (default if the timeline layout is set to default); setting this to 0 (or false) will suppress avatars (default for the XChat timeline layout).
  • UI/suppress_local_echo - set this to 1 (or true) to suppress showing local echo (events sent from the current application but not yet confirmed by the server). By default local echo is shown.
  • UI/animations_duration_ms - defines the base duration (in milliseconds) of animation effects in the timline. The default is 400; set it to 0 to disable animation.
  • UI/outgoing_color - set this to the color name you prefer for text you sent; HTML color names and SVG #codes are supported; by default it's #204A87 (navy blue).
  • UI/highlight_color - set this to the color name you prefer for highlighted rooms/messages; HTML color names and SVG #codes are supported; by default it's orange.
  • UI/highlight_mode - set this to text if you prefer to use the highlight color as the text color (the only option available until 0.0.9.3); the new default is to use the background for highlighting.
  • UI/use_human_friendly_dates - set this to false (or 0) if you do NOT want usage of human-friendly dates ("Today", "Monday" instead of the standard day-month-year triad) in the UI; the default is true.
  • UI/quote_style - the quote template. The \\1 means the quoted string. By default it's > \\1\n.
  • UI/quote_regex - set to ^([\\s\\S]*) to add UI/quote_style only at the beginning and end of the quote. By default it's (.+)(?:\n|$).
  • UI/Fonts/render_type - select how to render fonts in Quaternion timeline; possible values are "NativeRendering" (default) and "QtRendering".
  • UI/Fonts/family - override the font family for the whole application. If not specified, the default font for your environment is used.
  • UI/Fonts/pointSize - override the font size (in points) for the whole application. If not specified, the default size for your environment is used.
  • UI/Fonts/timeline_family - font family (for example Monospace) to display messages in the timeline. If not specified, the application-wide font family is used.
  • UI/Fonts/timeline_pointSize - font size (in points) to display messages in the timeline. If not specified, the application-wide point size is used.

Since version 0.0.9.4, AppImage binaries for Linux and .dmg files for macOS are compiled with Qt Keychain support. It means that Quaternion will try to store your access token(s) in the secure storage configured for your platform. If the storage or Qt Keychain are not available, Quaternion will try to store your access token(s) in a dedicated file with restricted access rights so that only the owner can access them (this doesn't really work on Windows - see below) and with the name matching your user id in the following directory:

  • Linux: $HOME/.local/share/Quotient/quaternion
  • macOS: $HOME/Library/Application Support/Quotient/quaternion
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%/Quotient/quaternion

Unfortunately, Quaternion cannot enforce proper access rights on Windows; you'll see a warning about it and will be able to either refuse saving your access token in that case or agree and setup file permissions outside Quaternion.

Quaternion caches the rooms state and user/room avatars on the file system in a conventional location for your platform, as follows:

  • Linux: $HOME/.cache/Quotient/quaternion
  • macOS: $HOME/Library/Cache/Quotient/quaternion
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%/Quotient/quaternion/cache

Cache files are safe to delete at any time but Quaternion only looks for them when starting up and overwrites them regularly while running; so it only makes sense to delete cache files when Quaternion is not running. If Quaternion doesn't find or cannot fully load cache files at startup it downloads the whole state from Matrix servers. It tries to optimise this process by lazy-loading if the server supports it; in an unlucky case when the server cannot do lazy-loading, initial sync can take much time (up to a minute and even more, depending on the number of rooms and the number of users in them). Deleting cache files may help with problems such as missing avatars, rooms stuck in a wrong state etc.

Troubleshooting

libQuotient has its own section on troubleshooting - make sure to look into its README.md too.

Continuously reconnecting though the network is fine

If Quaternion starts displaying the message that it couldn't connect to the server and retries more than a couple of times without success, while you're sure you have the network connection - double-check that you don't have Qt bearer management libraries around, as they cause issues with some WiFi networks. To do that, try to find "bearer" directory where your Qt is installed (on Windows it's next to Quaternion executable; on Linux it's a part of Qt installation, usually in /usr/lib/qt5/plugins). Then delete or rename it (on Windows) or delete the package that this directory is in (on Linux).

No messages in the timeline

If Quaternion runs but you can't see any messages in the chat (though you can type them in) - you have either of two problems with Qt Quick (or if you are extremely unlucky, both):

  • You might not have Qt Quick libraries and/or plugins installed. On Linux, this may be a case when you are not using the official packages for your distro. Check the stdout/stderr logs, they are quite clear in such cases. On Windows and Mac, just open an issue (see "Contacts" in the beginning of this README), because most likely not all necessary Qt parts were installed along with Quaternion (which is a bug).
  • If the logs confirm that QML is up and running but there's still nothing for the timeline, you might have hit an issue with QML view stacking order, such as #355/#356. If you use Qt 5.12 or newer (as is the case on Windows and macOS recently), please file a bug: it should not happen with recent Qt at all. If you are on Linux and have to use older Qt, you have to build Quaternion from sources, passing -DUSE_QQUICKWIDGET=ON to CMake. Note that it's prone to crashing on some platforms so it's best to still find a way to run Quaternion with Qt 5.12 (using AppImage, e.g.).

SSL problems

Especially on Windows, if Quaternion starts up but upon an attempt to connect returns a message like "Failed to make SSL context" - correct SSL libraries are not reachable by the Quaternion binary. Re-read the chapter "Requirements", section "Windows" in the beginning of this file and do as it advises. Make sure you use correct version OpenSSL.

DLL hell

If you have troubles with dynamic libraries on Windows, the Dependencies Walker tool aka depends.exe helps a lot in navigating the DLL hell - especially when you have a mixed 32/64-bit environment or have different versions of the same library scattered around. OpenSSL, in particular, is notoriously often dragged along by all kinds of software; and you may have other copies of Qt around which you didn't even know about - e.g., with CMake GUI.

Logging

If you run Quaternion from a console on Windows and want to see log messages, set QT_LOGGING_TO_CONSOLE=1 so that the output is redirected to the console.

When chasing bugs and investigating crashes, it helps to increase the debug level. Thanks to @eang:matrix.org, libQuotient uses Qt logging categories - the "Troubleshooting" section of the library's README.md elaborates on how to setup logging. Note that Quaternion itself doesn't use Qt logging categories yet, only the library does.

You may also want to set QT_MESSAGE_PATTERN to make logs slightly more informative (see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtglobal.html#qSetMessagePattern for the format description). My (@kitsune's) QT_MESSAGE_PATTERN looks as follows: %{time h:mm:ss.zzz}|%{category}|%{if-debug}D%{endif}%{if-info}I%{endif}%{if-warning}W%{endif}%{if-critical}C%{endif}%{if-fatal}F%{endif}|%{message} (the scary %{if}s are just encoding the logging level into its initial letter).

Screenshot

Screenshot