mt — native Meshtastic desktop client

A cross-platform desktop client for Meshtastic radios, written in Rust with egui. Connects over BLE (primary), USB serial, or TCP to a Meshtastic device and provides feature parity with the official web / mobile clients for day-to-day operation.

Features

• Transports: BLE (macOS / Linux / Windows via btleplug), USB serial, TCP.
• Chat: per-channel broadcast, direct messages, ack / nack with visual delivery state (○ queued · ◐ sent · ✓ acked · ✗ failed).
• Nodes: live + cached roster, last-heard, SNR / RSSI / battery, favorites, ignore-list, traceroute with per-hop SNR.
• Channels: 8 slots, role / name / PSK controls (AES256, AES128, 1-byte default preset, clear), MQTT uplink / downlink, position precision, share URL import / export (compatible with the meshtastic.org/e/# scheme used by web and mobile clients).
• Settings: Owner / LoRa / Device / Position / Power / Network / Display / Bluetooth / MQTT / Telemetry / Neighbor Info / Store-and-Forward module configs, with tooltips on every field.
• Admin actions: reboot / shutdown / reboot-to-OTA / factory reset (device / config only) / NodeDB reset, gated by destructive-action confirmation modals.
• Local persistence: node roster and chat history survive disconnects (SQLite under the platform data dir). Messages scoped per-device.
• Status bar: connection state, link health, battery, channel utilization, airtime, relay count.
• Resilience: receive-side watchdog + metadata probe reconnect cleanly after the OS suspends the radio (e.g. laptop lid close / wake).

Install

From source

git clone <this repo>
cd mt
cargo build --release

Binary ends up at target/release/mt.

A minimal headless CLI for BLE connectivity testing is also built: target/release/mt-cli.

Runtime requirements

• macOS: first launch over BLE prompts for Bluetooth permission under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Bluetooth. Grant it, restart the app.
• Linux: requires BlueZ ≥ 5.56. The user must be able to access org.bluez over D-Bus (bluetooth group or a polkit rule). USB serial usually needs the user to be in the dialout or uucp group.
• Windows: BLE works out of the box on Windows 10 21H2+. USB serial needs the vendor CP210x / CH340 driver for the board.

Running

cargo run --release

On first launch you'll see the connection screen. Scan for BLE devices, enter a TCP host:port, or select a serial port, then hit Connect. The app remembers profiles in ~/Library/Application Support/mt/profiles.toml (macOS) / ~/.config/mt/profiles.toml (Linux) / %APPDATA%\mt\profiles.toml (Windows).

Message history and the node roster are persisted in mt.sqlite alongside the profiles file.

Development

• cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings must pass clean. The crate enables clippy::pedantic, clippy::nursery, and denies unwrap_used, expect_used, panic, indexing_slicing, integer_division, and friends in production code.
• cargo test runs the unit / integration test suite.
• Protobuf definitions are vendored under vendor/meshtastic-protobufs and regenerated at build time via build.rs.

See RELEASING.md for how to cut and ship a release build.

License

Dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 or MIT, at your option. The bundled DejaVu Sans font is redistributed under its own permissive license — see assets/DejaVuSans-LICENSE.txt.