Hotline Navigator

v0.2.8:

There's been a lot of rapid changes in Navigator's capabilities so this release UX quality-of-life series of fixes since the Discord style chat introduced a new UX paradigm which inevitable had some loose ends.

Disconnects are detected in seconds instead of minutes, chat icons no longer fall back to gray letter placeholders for emotes or for users who chatted before their info loaded, and! / / commands now appear above the bot's response instead of below it. News browsing also works on multi-tier servers like VesperNet, where top-level entries are folders of folders.

Next release will be new feature bound.

Bugfixes and Improvements:

• Faster disconnect detection — When a server vanishes silently (peer crash, network drop, NAT timeout), the client now notices in ~60s on macOS/Linux and ~130s on Windows, down from the OS TCP retransmit default of 15+ minutes. Auto-reconnect kicks in correspondingly faster.

• News browsing on nested servers — On servers like VesperNet where the top-level news entries are folders containing more folders, navigation no longer dead-ends with an empty article pane. The client now dispatches based on the clicked item's actual type (bundle vs. category) rather than assuming any non-root path holds articles.

Technical:

• TCP SO_KEEPALIVE configured on the control channel via socket2: idle=30s, interval=10s, retries=3 on macOS/Linux. Windows uses the OS default retry count.
• App-level keepalive failure now emits StatusChanged(Disconnected) and clears the transport, instead of silently breaking.

• Optimistic insert tagged with pending: true and optimisticKey; echo dedup matches by userName + message text within a 10s window. /me and /em are preformatted as *** name action to match the server echo. 30s safety timeout clears the pending flag if no echo arrives.
• News load effect dispatches on a tracked newsLeafType (2 = bundle → get_news_categories; 3 = category → get_news_articles). Going back always sets leaf type to bundle, since non-leaf path segments are bundles by invariant.

Installation:

Download the installer for your platform from the release assets.

.dmg = macOS, .msi/.exe = Windows, .apk = Android, .ipa = iOS/iPadOS, Linux hippies can figure it out.

Hotline Navigator:

Official Website.

What the hell is Hotline?:

Hotline in concept, was to replicate a BBS but for the internet age. Modern users would recongize more as a proto peer-to-peer or a Discord like application.

Hotline's Navigator's website has a deeper drive the history of Hotline.

Platform Support:

Right now the iOS, iPadOS, and Android versions are not in their respective app stores and must be built manually or sideloaded.

This is a Tauri-based Hotline client that provides a modern, cross-platform experience for the classic Hotline protocol. Built with React and Rust, it offers:

• Cross-Platform: Single codebase for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and Android.
• Modern Stack: React + TypeScript frontend, Rust backend.

• Native Performance: Tauri's lightweight architecture for fast, efficient apps.