crust

A native Twitch chat client written in Rust.

crust is a hobby project inspired by Chatterino, built as a multi-crate Rust workspace with an egui desktop UI, a Twitch IRC/WebSocket session layer, emote provider integrations, and local settings/log storage.

Screenshots

Current status

Active early-stage project. The app builds and runs, and core chat workflows are in place. APIs and internals may still change.

Features

• Twitch IRC over WebSocket - anonymous and authenticated modes
• Multi-channel tabs - join, leave, reorder channels
• Multi-account support - add, switch, remove, and set a default account
• Message rendering:
  • Twitch native emotes
  • Third-party emotes: BTTV, FFZ, 7TV (global + channel + personal sets)
  • Animated emote support (GIF, WebP)
  • Emoji tokenization via Twemoji URLs
  • Badge rendering (global + channel badges via IVR)
  • URL and @mention detection
  • Highlighted and first-message indicators
• Emote picker and : autocomplete with Tab completion
• Reply flow (threaded replies)
• Basic moderation: timeout, ban, unban
• User profile popup with avatar, badges, account metadata, and recent messages
• Link preview metadata fetch (Open Graph / Twitter card)
• Message input history (arrow-key recall)
• Local settings persistence and optional keyring-backed token storage
• Per-channel append-only chat logs
• Chat history on join (via recent-messages.robotty.de / IVR fallback)

Workspace layout

• crates/app - binary entrypoint, runtime wiring, reducer/event loop
• crates/ui - egui application and widgets
• crates/core - shared domain models, events, tokenizer/highlight/state
• crates/twitch - IRC parser + Twitch session client/reconnect/rate limiting
• crates/emotes - provider loaders and image cache (memory + disk)
• crates/storage - settings/token + log storage

Requirements

• Rust stable toolchain (edition 2021)
• Cargo
• Linux desktop dependencies for eframe/winit (X11 or Wayland)

Build and run

From the workspace root:

cargo check
cargo run -p crust

Release build:

cargo run -p crust --release

Running on WSL

Requires VcXsrv launched with the -wgl flag (or "Native opengl" checked in XLaunch) to expose GLX framebuffer configs. Mesa version overrides are needed to negotiate a valid OpenGL context:

export DISPLAY=172.17.128.1:0.0  # replace with your host IP - check /etc/resolv.conf nameserver
export MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3
export MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=330
export WINIT_UNIX_BACKEND=x11
unset WAYLAND_DISPLAY
cargo run -p crust --release

WSLg (Windows 11) - works out of the box with Wayland, no X server or overrides needed:

cargo run -p crust --release

Authentication

• Anonymous mode works for read-only chat.
• To send messages, log in with a Twitch OAuth token in-app.
• Multiple accounts are supported - switch accounts without restarting.
• Token storage uses the OS keyring when available, with a settings-file fallback.

Data paths

Using platform-specific app dirs via directories::ProjectDirs (typically):

• Config: ~/.config/crust/settings.toml
• Cache: ~/.cache/crust/emotes/
• Logs: ~/.local/share/crust/logs/

License

This project is licensed under GNU GPL v3.0. See LICENSE.