Starling Desktop

Native desktop client for Starling — a federated, peer-to-peer communications platform with no company in the middle.

Status: 📋 Planned — not yet started. The terminal client, Starling-TUI, is the working client today. This repo is a placeholder for the eventual windowed app. It's a graphical app — when ready, you'll download and install it normally. There's no starling install command for it.

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What this will be

A proper native application — not a browser tab wearing a costume — that gives you Starling's text, voice, and video with a mouse-and-window UI. The goal is to stay lean: use noticeably less memory and CPU than the mainstream chat apps it replaces.

It will speak the exact same murmuration as every other client. A flock you join from Desktop is the same flock your friend is in from the TUI.

How it's built (planned)

Starling Desktop is a thin UI over a shared core. The frontend is SolidJS, wrapped in a Tauri shell whose Rust backend is the starling-server library — so all the hard parts (the iroh endpoint, gossip, encryption, and the voice/video pipelines) are shared with every other client. This repo contains the SolidJS UI and the Tauri glue that pumps Command/AppEvent messages between the UI and that core.

Piece	Stack
Frontend	SolidJS
App shell	Tauri
Protocol / networking	starling-server library (Tauri's Rust backend)
Target platforms	Windows, macOS, Linux

Following along

• Design and roadmap live in the main Starling repo.
• The protocol this will implement is documented in Starling-Server.
• Want it sooner? The most useful help right now is exercising the protocol through the TUI and filing what breaks.

License

Apache 2.0