Paper Mesh

A native GNOME desktop client for Meshtastic mesh networks, built with Rust, GTK4, and libadwaita.

Paper Mesh lets you connect to a Meshtastic LoRa radio and chat with other nodes on the mesh — no phone required.

Features

• Device connection via serial port (USB) or TCP, with automatic detection of Meshtastic-compatible devices (CP210x, CH9102, CH340, ESP32-S3, nRF52840, etc.)
• Channel management — view, create, and delete mesh channels with configurable encryption (AES128/AES256/simple/none)
• Real-time messaging — send and receive text messages on any channel with broadcast or direct node targeting
• Radio metrics — view SNR, RSSI, and hop count for each received message
• Mesh node discovery — see all nodes in the mesh with their name, hardware model, battery level, and GPS position
• Message persistence — messages are saved locally and restored across app restarts
• Connection status — detailed step-by-step feedback during connection and configuration loading
• Adaptive layout — responsive split-view UI that works on both desktop and mobile form factors

Screenshots

Coming soon

Building

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable toolchain)
• meson >= 0.59
• GTK >= 4.12
• libadwaita >= 1.4
• blueprint-compiler

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install meson gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel blueprint-compiler

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S meson gtk4 libadwaita blueprint-compiler

Build & Install

meson setup _build -Dprofile=development
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Run

paper-mesh

Make sure your user is in the dialout group for serial port access:

sudo usermod -aG dialout $USER
# Log out and back in for the change to take effect

How It Works

Paper Mesh communicates with a Meshtastic radio using the meshtastic Rust crate over the device's serial (USB) or TCP interface. The radio handles all LoRa mesh networking — Paper Mesh is the user-facing chat client.

Architecture

GTK4/libadwaita UI  <-->  GLib main loop  <--(async-channel)-->  Tokio runtime  <-->  Meshtastic radio

• Model layer — GObject-based models for Device, Node, Channel, and Message that integrate with GTK's reactive property/signal system
• Device bridge — background Tokio thread handles the meshtastic protocol, communicates with the GTK main loop via async channels
• UI layer — Blueprint-defined templates with Rust widget implementations following GNOME HIG

Message Persistence

Messages are stored as JSON files per channel in ~/.local/share/paper-mesh/messages/. Up to 1000 messages per channel are retained.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later