notes on ermine development (01/XX)
Margret Riegert22 Feb 2026
blog@eowyn.net
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Requirements:
- Need a better Revolt client that’s cross-platform native
- Ideally macOS / iPadOS / iOS / Windows / Linux / Android / Web
- Need the UI / UX to be top-notch and feel good in the hands, otherwise people won’t use it
- On top of this, it should also be fun and cute
- Accessibility should be considered, but I do not have experience in this area, will need to do research
- Currently Revolt has a (now deprecated) web app and a native app that doesn’t support custom endpoints
- We’re forking from Revolt, so don’t need to worry about breaking changes on their end
- Sticking with the name ermine cause I like it (stylized
ermine all lowercase to be cool)
- Decided to try using Slint + Rust for a more bare-bones low-level approach
- Licensing
- Slint requires GPLv3 without a paid license - fine with this
- Revolt is also AGPLv3
- Code I write will be MIT as I don’t want to hinder people re-using anything for any reason
- Have already spent a number of hours 100% vibe coding a prototype
- Used Flutter + Dart (was considered for this iteration)
- It worked okay, had a UX close to what I want as a starting point, so we know what we want is possible, we just need to build it
- There are just too many bugs and there’s no way to trust the code written underneath
- Feel awful and ashamed of vibe coding, giving away my agency and creativity to an LLM and to big tech, rotting away my ability to create
- This is a project to push myself outside of my comfort zone towards something I’ve not done before, to grow beyond the limitations I’ve placed upon myself
- Having seen what other people’ve worked on, over months, and the kind of dedication they have towards software quality, I know this is something that will take time to craft instead of something I can bang out in a few hyperfixated days
Resources:
Notes:
- Slint reminds me a lot of when I tried messing with SwiftUI
- Trying to make things look pretty early on is a fools errand
- Need to remember to make things work, then make them look nice
- Have not used Rust before so this should be interesting
- HMC Revolt seems to be on version 0.8.2 while Stoat is now on 0.11.5
- Have an OpenAPI spec for the latest stoat, but no historical ones
- Need to figure out what differences exist, if any, and how to support different server versions cleanly
- Seems like there’s an
/api endpoint with information about the server (if it’s a revolt server)
- App version
- autumn endpoint (file server)
- january endpoint (media server)
- voso ?
- livekit ?
- livekit seems to be what’s used for voice / video support
- Currently not supported by HMC Revolt instance
- main websocket
- Trying to use progenitor + openAPI spec to generate rust code, not going that well, and Gwen said it may be better to write these by hand
- progenitor didn’t work due to it operating under the assumption that endpoints only return one type, which this spec violates (https://github.com/oxidecomputer/progenitor/issues/950)
- Read through documentation mostly, taking it slow and making sure I understand how things are working, being patient with myself
- Main repository online at: https://git.handmadecities.com/nobodywasishere/ermine
© 2020-2026 Margret Riegert
Unless otherwise noted, content is under a CC BY 4.0 license.