Threads, Plugins, and Forty-Seven Themes
Two weeks of Gryt in one post. Threads that hold a conversation, servers that run their own code, and a theme library that went from nineteen to forty-seven.
Threads landed, servers can run their own code, the theme library nearly tripled, and the app now installs the way people on Arch and macOS expected it to.
Most of it comes from the same problem. Once a server has more than about ten people on it, conversations need somewhere to go that isn't the main channel.
Threads
A channel is one room and everyone talks in it. That works until two conversations start at once, and then it doesn't.
You can start a thread off any message now, and inside it you get what a channel gives you: replies, edits, reactions, someone typing, scrolling back through the whole thing. A mention points at the thread it happened in, so clicking it takes you to the message instead of to the channel it hangs off.
The part that took longest was unread counts. A thread's replies are counted against the thread now. Before that, answering someone in a thread badged the channel, you clicked in expecting a message, and the channel looked empty, because the message was one level down. The footer under a message shows what's unread inside it, and goes quiet once you've read it.
Forum channels came with the same work. They're threads with the list turned inside out: every post is its own thread, and the channel is the index.
Servers can run their own code
A server can load plugins. They run on the server, not in your client, and they get a narrow API rather than the run of the place. Every member can see the list of what a server runs before deciding to join it.
You should get to say no to somebody else's server running code you can't see. So that list is on the join screen and not buried in settings.
Forty-seven themes
There were nineteen. Now there are forty-seven, in ten collections: Gryt, Owl, Midnight, Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Nature, Pastel and Brands. Owl is the six palettes the owl avatars are drawn from. Brands is the ported ones — Dracula, Nord, Catppuccin, GitHub, Claude, shadcn/ui, Solarized.
I generated the twenty-eight new ones in OKLCH instead of picking them by eye. Each one clears fourteen contrast rules across the light and dark halves: text, muted, border, accent, and 7:1 for ink sitting on a filled colour.
Running that check turned up a theme that had already shipped. Winter Arc missed on four of its six ink-on-fill pairs: 6.07 and 4.96 in the dark half, 4.68 and 5.27 in the light one. I'd left it out of the check by name when the collections landed, because changing a shipped theme's colour felt like a separate decision. It is one, and I made it: the theme moved. Its dark danger came up from 0.62 to 0.71 lightness, which is the smallest step that clears the bar. You'd notice if you wear it.
Forty-seven is too many for one list, so the picker groups them, and so does the theme section on the front page.
Searching the settings
The settings list used to draw a category and the page inside it the same way, so the page you had open looked like the category it sits in. Sub-pages are indented under their category now, the one you're on is marked, and opening a category slides its pages out instead of snapping them open.
Catching up on a busy server
Channels can live in folders you drag them into, and you can mark a channel, a folder or a whole server as read.
The server keeps your mentions now, instead of working them out per session. So the one you saw on your phone is gone on your laptop too.
Signing out of a computer you're not sitting at
You can end your sessions on your other devices and stay signed in on the one in your hand. Every member carries a token version. Ending a session moves it, and the old tokens stop being accepted straight away.
Where you can install it
There's a build for Intel Macs again, and an RPM alongside the deb. The Homebrew cask and the AUR package both track the current release, so:
brew install --cask gryt-chat/tap/gryt-chat
yay -S gryt-chat-bin
Snap and winget are registered but still behind. They're on the list.
Update (Sep 16, 2026): Snap has caught up. sudo snap install gryt-chat installs the
current release now.
Try it
Start a thread off a message in a busy channel, and open Appearance and press through a collection. Between them that's most of the last fortnight.