Ferdi

🤴🏽 Hard-fork of Franz, adding awesome features and removing unwanted ones.

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Ferdi

What is Ferdi?

Ferdi is a desktop app that helps you organize how you use your favourite apps by combining them into one application. It is based on Franz - a software already used by thousands of people - with the difference that Ferdi gives you many additional features and doesn't restrict its usage! Ferdi is compatible with your existing Franz account so you can continue right where you left off. Find out more about Ferdi and its features on getferdi.com.

Features

...and best of all:

Its completely free! There are no restrictions on features, no paywalls

What does Ferdi look like?

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"Keep all your messaging services in one place." "Order your services with Ferdi Workspaces." "Always keep your Todos list open with Ferdi Todos." "Supporting all your services."

How to get and start using Ferdi

Download Ferdi

You can download Ferdi for Windows, Mac and Linux on Ferdi's download page or you can find all variants in the latest stable release assets and all the other release here.

Or use Chocolatey (Windows only)

$ choco install ferdi

(Don't know Chocolatey? chocolatey.org)

Or use Windows Package Manager (Windows only)

$ winget install --id AmineMouafik.Ferdi

(Don't know winget? winget-cli)

Or use homebrew (macOS or Linux)

$ brew install --cask ferdi

(Don't know homebrew? brew.sh)

Or use snap (Linux only)

$ snap install ferdi

You can find published releases as stable, beta and nightly channels on snapcraft.io.

(Don't know snap? snapcraft.io)

Or use AUR (Arch Linux)

Ferdi has three separate AUR packages you can use:

ferdi: Uses your system electron version to run the latest release - this version will work best on most systems.
ferdi-bin: Uses the latest Fedora release and extracts it to Arch. Use this version if you are having trouble with the ferdi package.
ferdi-git: Uses your system electron version to run the latest commit from the develop branch and may be unstable but may also give you features that are not yet available in other versions. Please only use ferdi-git if you accept these risks.

If you use an AUR Helper e.g. yay, simply install it via yay -S ferdi.

What makes Ferdi different from Franz?

Removes unproductive paywalls and other other interruptions

Removes the counter-productive fullscreen app delay inviting users to upgrade
Removes pages begging you to donate after registration
Removes "Franz is better together" popup
Makes all users Premium by default (#15)

Adds features to increase your productivity

Adds features to improve your privacy

Adds option to change server to a custom ferdi-server
Adds option to use Ferdi without an account (#5)
Uses the Ferdi API instead of Franz's servers
Adds "Private Notification"-Mode, that hides message content from notifications (franz#879)
Adds Password Lock feature to keep your messages protected (#41, franz#810, franz#950, franz#1430)
Adds support for unlocking with Touch ID (#367)
Adds inactivity lock that automatically locks Ferdi after a specified amount of time (#179)
Adds local recipe repository that removes the need of downloading recipes from a remote server

Adds features to improve your experience using Ferdi

Fixes bugs

Adds new platforms

Adds portable version for Windows so you can use Ferdi without even installing it, 💖 @Makazzz
Adds Arch Linux AUR packages, 💖 @AGCaesar
Adds Ferdi as a Flatpak on Flathub (#323), 💖 @lhw

Adds internal changes

Upgrades to Electron 13.2.1
Switches to electron-spellchecker to improve application size
Minifies build files to improve app size
Adds "npm run prepare-code" command for development to lint and beautify code
Adds "npm run link-readme" command to automatically add links to issues and users inside README.md
Fixes incorrect body closing tag (#330), 💖 @jereksel
Uses CrowdIn to improve i18n
Adds retry commands to flaky build steps (#498)
Runs utility scripts pre-commit instead of pre-push (#515)

Thanks to all our contributors who helped realize all these amazing features! 💖

Contributing to Ferdi's development

We welcome all contributors. Please read the contributing guidelines to setup your development machine and proceed.

Nightly releases

Nightly releases are automatically triggered every day (details) and available in getferdi/nightlies. Maintainers still need to manually publish the draft releases as pre-releases for now.

Troubleshooting recipes (self-help)

One of the issues being raised by the awesome users of Ferdi is that certain service-functionalities do not work. As good example of this is either the unread count (badge) stops working for specific services or the gmail logins don't work anymore. (These are just 2 of the most common problems reported).

Since we (the contributors to Ferdi) also eat our own dog food, we use Ferdi as our day-to-day communication app - and most likely have faced the same/similar issue. As a first step before filing an issue, we request you to follow these simple steps to see if the issue gets fixed. These recipes will get automatically upgraded when you upgrade to the newer versions of Ferdi, but to get new recipes between Ferdi releases, this documentation is quite useful.

Make sure you are on the latest version of Ferdi. As of this writing, since the nightly CI packaging process is broken, we request you to download the latest nightly from the link in Nightly releases section.
Stop Ferdi
Navigate to the Ferdi profile folder in your respective installation in your file explorer application.

  Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Ferdi/recipes
  Windows: %appdata%/Ferdi/recipes
  Linux: ~/.config/Ferdi/recipes

Delete the folder of the service that is causing your issue - in the file explorer application. (Please note that if you have manually modified any files here, it will be your responsibility to merge the changes with the latest version of the recipe (or you can submit a pull request for the same).
Open a browser and navigate to the recipes repository page, and copy ALL the files for your erroneous service into your local machine at the location that you deleted in the previous step
Restart Ferdi (this should upgrade your recipes to the latest working version that the contributors have fixed)
If this process did not fix the issue, please log a detailed bug report here
Note: An automated process to perform these steps is being ideated and tracked here