yapfast/yapfast

A Discord client without the web browser.
About 40 MB of RAM, where Discord's own app takes 800.

Download for Windows  ·  yapfast.com  ·  Discord server  ·  Features  ·  Build it yourself

_{A test account on a fake Discord server. Nobody in there said any of this, or endorses Yapfast (sadly).}

Discord's desktop app is a whole ass Chromium running Discord's website, and it sits at about 800 MB of RAM doing nothing (insane, I know right?!?). That annoyed me enough to write my own in Rust.

Yapfast does the same job (doing nothing) in about 40 MB. There's no browser engine anywhere in it or near it: it talks to Discord's API itself and draws its own window with Slint and Skia, like a game would. Your servers, DMs, friends, voice and GIFs are all there, and if you know Discord, you already know where everything is.

It opens fast af, too. I timed both, from clicking the icon to reading my messages: Discord took 8 seconds on my PC, Yapfast took 0.22, because it shows the messages it saved last time and catches up while you read.

Sitting in a call with the window open, it's about 60 MB, and noise suppression alone eats 20 of those; that's as small as I could get it :( There's a GPU renderer too, behind Render with the GPU in Settings, but it takes about 120 MB, and drawing on the processor already keeps a 180 Hz monitor fed, so the processor is the default. Your numbers will depend on how many servers and DMs you have. How I measure.

It's a 0.1 beta, and it's what I use for Discord every day, so it had better be usable. Still, there are rough edges; when you hit one, open an issue and I'll fix it, or come hang out on the Yapfast Discord server and tell me there. The connection drops every now and then (no more often than Vesktop's or the official app's does for me), and the noise suppression could be better. Know an open source one that does a better job? PLEASE tell me.

Straight from your PC to Discord, or to your Matrix server. I don't run a Yapfast server, so nothing in between could keep a copy (I'd have to pay for servers just to snoop on your DMs, and no thanks :D).

• You link your account by scanning a QR code with Discord's phone app, so Yapfast never sees your password.
• The login token stays in your system's credential store, and only ever goes to Discord. Unlinking signs that session out and deletes it.
• It sends no analytics or crash reports, and doesn't check for updates.
• Pictures and GIFs load from wherever they're hosted, such as Discord or Tenor.

Don't want to take my word for it? Fair, the code's all right here.

1. Download Yapfast-…-windows-x64-setup.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it. It installs just for you, with no administrator prompt. The installer isn't signed yet, so SmartScreen may get nervous: choose More info, then Run anyway.
3. Yapfast shows a QR code. On your phone, open Discord, go to Settings → Scan QR Code, and point the camera at it.

Rather skip the installer? The release has a portable ZIP too: extract it and double-click yapfast.exe.

Yapfast starts with Windows and waits in the tray, so messages and calls still reach you. Untick that in the installer, or turn it off later in Settings → Advanced.

It runs great on both X11 and Wayland, screen sharing too (Hyprland here). There's no package yet; an AppImage and an Arch package are coming with the next release. Until then, if you have Nix, it's one command (pretty sure, anyway :D), and you get the same Discord-only app the releases ship, in your launcher:

nix profile add github:yapfast/yapfast#yapfast

It compiles from source, so give it a few minutes. No Nix? Then build it yourself.

Not yet, sorry :( I'd love to make one, but I don't own an Apple machine to test it on.

Want what's on main right now, without waiting for a release or building it yourself? Every now and then I put out a nightly build of the Discord-only app. They're on the releases page, marked Pre-release, newest first, each with a list of what changed:

• Windows: the portable ZIP. Extract it and double-click yapfast.exe.
• Linux: the AppImage, the one coming to releases too. chmod +x it and run it.
• Arch Linux: the .pkg.tar.zst, the one coming to releases too. Install it with sudo pacman -U and the file or its link.

They're untested between releases, so expect the odd rough edge.

• Servers, channels, DMs and group DMs, all live. Pin, mute or close a DM from its menu, and accept or ignore message requests.
• Messages you can send, reply to, edit, react to, pin, forward and attach files to, with Markdown, embeds, custom emoji, stickers and spoilers.
• Threads: start one from a message, browse a channel's threads, join or leave one, and read it beside its channel.
• Forums: browse the posts as cards, with their tags, first message, top reaction and thumbnail, search them, post in them, and read one beside the forum.
• Search a whole server with Discord's filters, and browse a channel's pins.
• The GIF picker, my favorite part :p Your favorites live on disk as 40 KB clips, so they're there the moment it opens, and you're done sitting there cringing while the GOATed GIF loads.
• Voice channels and DM calls, with mute, deafen, a volume for each person, noise suppression, echo removal, and a voice gate you can tune, or push-to-talk on any key you like, held in any app. Go Live, watch other people's streams and turn on your camera. The call stays up while you read other channels.
• Friends: requests, adding by username, nicknames, notes, profile cards, your status and custom status (custom emoji included). Block and ignore people from their menu, and hide what blocked people write.
• Running a server: make and edit channels and categories, invite people, hand out roles, change nicknames, time out, kick and ban. In voice, server mute, deafen and move people to another channel. Edit your server profile, and leave. Join a server by invite, from the + under your servers or a link in chat. Folders show up as they do in Discord.
• Notifications that follow your Discord settings, muting for channels, categories and servers, unread markers and member lists.
• Ten themes, Catppuccin and Tokyo Night among them, and Bonfire, which is Discord's own colors. Or make your own in the editor, and watch the window change as you type each color.
• Soft sounds for joining, leaving, muting and messages, in six sets.

• Media channels.
• The soundboard.
• Activities and server settings.
• Making and changing server folders.
• A server's form for new members, such as its rules, when you join. Yapfast sends you to Discord in your browser to fill it in.
• A list of the people you blocked.
• Leaving a group DM.
• Animated custom emoji in messages, which show their first frame.
• Captchas, sort of. If Discord asks for one while you link or join a server, Yapfast opens it in your browser, but I haven't hit one against real Discord yet, so who knows..

Use Discord in a browser for these until then; it has all of it, and you have a browser open anyway. The Discord plan has the rest, in the order I'm working on it.

• Vesktop if you want plugins. Yapfast has none yet (they're coming, dw), and Vesktop ships with Vencord's.
• Ripcord if you want something even plainer. It's native too, but closed source, and it does Slack on the side.

Yapfast started as a Matrix client, and Matrix still works: encrypted rooms, Spaces as servers, and voice channels over MatrixRTC, in the same window as Discord. The release is Discord-only for now, so build it yourself to get both.

After that I'd like Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger in there too. No clue when, but hopefully at some point :p

Why not Tauri? Tauri apps run a website too; they just borrow your system's web view instead of shipping their own Chromium. The browser is the exact thing I wanted gone, so hell no.

Can I use my Vencord plugins? Nope. They need a JavaScript runtime, and Yapfast's insides look nothing like what they expect. Yapfast will get plugins of its own, though, and open source Vencord ones could be ported once it does.

How is it different from Serein? Serein draws with wgpu, which costs more memory before you've opened a single channel. Yapfast draws with Slint, on the processor by default (WAY lighter) or the GPU if you ask. It also does Matrix (from source, for now), DeepFilterNet noise suppression on top of RNNoise, voice gates, and the cached GIF picker. It's still missing a few things, like media channels and the soundboard.

Did you use AI to write it? Yep. Opus 5.5 wrote most of the code, and 6.1 Sol and 6 Astra did adversarial review and helped with the nastiest bugs (networking protocols mixed with VP8 is a bit much for a side project :D). It wasn't one prompt and done, though. I've used it every day for weeks, profiled it with perf, read the code, and bent the UX to my muscle memory, so switching over hurts as little as it can.

Yapfast builds inside a pinned Nix environment, which brings the right Rust, Clang and native libraries. From the project folder:

# Try the UI without an account
nix develop path:./nix --command cargo run --locked -- --preview

# Run it for real, with Discord and Matrix
nix develop path:./nix --command cargo run --locked

# Discord only, like the release
nix develop path:./nix --command cargo run --locked --no-default-features --features desktop,discord

# Windows installer and ZIP, cross-built from Linux, into target/dist
nix develop path:./nix#windows --command scripts/build-windows

# Format, lint and test everything
scripts/check --fast

Memory is a product goal. Keep every change lean, and give the numbers you measured in any commit that saves memory.

Yapfast is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. Builds with Matrix also include MatrixRTC libraries under the AGPL. Every release carries its dependencies' own licenses. Take it, I don't even care, baka.

Yapfast speaks to Discord the way its own apps do, as documented by Discord Userdoccers, a community effort to document the user side of Discord's API. Thanks to everyone who writes it <3

It stands on Slint, Skia, LiveKit and WebRTC, matrix-rust-sdk and DeepFilterNet. My patches to Slint live in vendor/, with the rest of the code.

_{Yapfast isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Discord Inc. Discord is a trademark of Discord Inc.}