Terminal client (Matterhorn)

Matterhorn (opens in new tab) is a full-screen terminal client for Mattermost — keyboard-driven and fast, with no Electron. It talks to the same server as the web and desktop apps, so your channels, DMs, threads, and reactions are all there. Good if you live in the shell.

Install on macOS

The Homebrew cask is deprecated (it trips macOS Gatekeeper), so grab the release build directly:

1. Open the releases page (opens in new tab) and copy the URL of the build for your Mac:
   • Apple Silicon (M-series): the …-Darwin-arm64.tar.bz2 file
   • Intel: the …-Darwin-x86_64.tar.bz2 file
2. Download it with curl — downloading in the terminal skips the macOS quarantine flag, so Gatekeeper won’t block it (the binary is ad-hoc signed):

   mkdir -p ~/scripts/matterhorn && cd ~/scripts/matterhorn
   curl -sSL -O "<paste the release URL>"
   tar xjf matterhorn-*.tar.bz2
   

3. Put it on your PATH (any directory already on your PATH works):

   ln -sf "$PWD"/matterhorn-*/matterhorn /opt/homebrew/bin/matterhorn   # Apple Silicon
   # Intel Homebrew instead: /usr/local/bin/matterhorn
   

Install on Linux

The same releases page has prebuilt tarballs for Fedora and Ubuntu. Extract and put the matterhorn binary on your PATH.

Configure

Create ~/.config/matterhorn/config.ini:

[mattermost]
user: your-username
host: <your lab chat server>     # the address is in your invite email, or ask Francisco
port: 443
team: nuilab

Signing in: leave the password out and Matterhorn will prompt you at launch. If you’d rather not be prompted, point passcmd (or tokencmd) at a command that returns your password or a personal access token from a secret store — for example the macOS keychain (security find-generic-password -s matterhorn -w) or secret-tool on Linux. Don’t hardcode a password in the file.

Launch

matterhorn

Inside, type /help for the full keybinding list and /quit to exit.

Keyboard cheat-sheet

Matterhorn is entirely keyboard-driven. The essentials:

Tip: Ctrl-g is the fastest way around — press it, type part of a channel or person’s name, and hit Enter.

Prefer your own IRC client?

matterircd (opens in new tab) is a small bridge that makes Mattermost look like an IRC server on localhost:6667, so you can use any IRC client (WeeChat, irssi, …). It has no interface of its own — what you see is your IRC client — so image-search results for it are a mix of Mattermost and IRC screenshots, which can be confusing.

Documentation

• Matterhorn — README and releases (opens in new tab)
• Matterhorn in the Mattermost Marketplace (opens in new tab)
• Mattermost desktop & apps (opens in new tab)
• Mattermost documentation home (opens in new tab)