signal-native

This repository allows you to build a native Mac client for Signal, with some extra fixes and features that following this guide won't give you (thanks for the initial guide though!).

Features

• Uses the Signal icon in task switcher
• External links will open correctly in your configured external browser
• Extra keyboard shortcuts
  • cmd+shift+[ and cmd+shift+] switch to previous/next chats in your list
  • cmd+f, cmd+/ and / focus the Search box

Build + install

Before you build, you'll need to have:

• yarn
• possibly nvm

# This is the version I happened to use, it might work with any old version?
# You might be able to skip these nvm steps and move on to cloning the repo
nvm install 8.0.0
nvm use

git clone https://github.com/dbalatero/signal-native.git
cd signal-native

yarn install
./bin/package

cp -r 'dist/Signal Private Messenger.app' /Applications

Open questions

1. How does the security model of nwjs affect the build of this client? Currently we are passing { nodejs: true } as an option to the client build, which enables us to access the nw variables from the browser. It doesn't seem to add access to things like process or fs, but more audit would be good.

2. Can we isolate the code that relies on nodejs: true in a better way? nwjs documentation is a little spotty on this. It's really only needed for this external link fix.

3. I should probably just contribute the keyboard shortcuts back to the Signal Desktop repo.

Develop new features

To start developing, you can run brunch watch in the background to auto-build the project as you develop.

To start a dev copy of the Signal app, just run npm run dev.

Once the app is open, you can right-click on the app and select Reload app to refresh your changes. brunch watch will take care of rebuilding the source as you save files.