Lightning 0.9.9

A release made mostly of the interface: a sustained accessibility and layout
pass that turned dozens of "needs looking at" observations into fixed defects,
a Spaces rail you can now shape to taste, and a first-class NixOS package
contributed from outside the project. Nothing in the messaging, calling or
encryption contracts changed; this is the release that makes what was already
there legible, reachable and correctly drawn.

Accessibility and layout

Several review rounds swept the interface with geometric checks rather than
source reading, and each one found collisions a source scan could not: two
affordances anchored to one edge that only overlap on a short row, ink drawn
the same colour as the fill beneath it, focus that could not reach a control
the eye could see. Cards that were the colour of the page on ten of eleven
themes now stand off it; a theme radio ring invisible in every light palette
is visible; the text selection highlight that reported "Ctrl+A doesn't work" is
drawn again; a destructive confirm that could not be clicked away can be. The
theme editor now grades the contrast of the colours you give it instead of
claiming a rating it never checked.

The Spaces rail, shaped to taste

The Channels layout's Spaces rail draws the Space hierarchy as a tinted tree —
subspaces rearrange like any other tile, deep trees dive rather than pile up,
and depth carries a second cue beyond lightness. If you preferred the flat
list it used to be, that is now a setting: the rail can be the plain,
activity-ordered list again.

Accounts, presence and the viewer

The account switcher is a clean list of rows, and every signed-in account's
last known avatar is kept on disk so it is there before the account syncs.
Presence publishing follows the server's own backoff and jitters its
keep-alive so two of your devices stop colliding. The image viewer gained
click-to-zoom, wheel-to-pan and navigation that wraps, and media and link
embeds can collapse to a single line in the timeline. A call now says out loud
when a peer is encrypting into a call the room believes is unencrypted.

Packaging

NixOS. The Nix flake package gained webp and JPEG XL image support
(qt6.qtimageformats and kdePackages.kimageformats) and resolves the
qt.multimedia PipeWire symbol load by putting PipeWire on the wrapper's
library path; the flake inputs were refreshed to a nixpkgs that no longer
SIGSEGVs after 0.9.0. Contributed by Seikm and verified on NixOS with
lightning-matrix --image-format-status.

Flathub. The Flatpak submission manifest was rewritten to the form Flathub
asks for: the cmake-ninja buildsystem, no manifest-side file renames — the
desktop, icon and metainfo files are installed under the app id by the build
itself now — and no build restricted to a single architecture, so the aarch64
builder is free to try.

This is a read-only mirror. It is not a release authority.

The canonical Lightning 0.9.9 release lives on GitLab:
https://gitlab.smetonis.net/Mizerd/lightning/-/releases/v0.9.9

The files attached here are byte-identical copies of the artifacts published
there. They exist so downloads do not all have to come from one small server.
Nothing about this page decides anything: it does not determine what version
exists, what is installable, or what Lightning will accept.

Verify any download against the SHA256SUMS asset, which is itself a copy of
the published one.

Lightning's in-app updater fetches its update manifest only from GitLab and
verifies an Ed25519 signature made with a key that exists nowhere near GitHub.
Every downloaded file is checked against the SHA-256 recorded in that signed
manifest before it is installed, so replacing a file here cannot cause Lightning
to install it.

Issues, source, and history: https://gitlab.smetonis.net/Mizerd/lightning