Caesar is an open-source project reimplementing Discord's desktop bootstrapper and core modules1.
Caesar is a free and open-source, stability- and performance-oriented reimplementation of the Discord desktop bootstrapper application. This is commonly referred to as the app.asar file2.
Caesar is distributed both as a packed ASAR archive to be used with an existing Discord installation and also as a standalone application.
Discord's official bootstrapper is slow, bloated, and unhackable. Caesar aims to fix this. Alternatives exist, such as GooseMod and my own personal (and now unmaintained) fork steviegt6/nucleus, but they are unsatisfactory.
The two main reasons to create an alternative to OpenAsar instead of forking it and potentially contributing back are 1) OpenAsar reuses large swaths of proprietary code and 2) the project scopes are simply different; OpenAsar aims to reimplement the main bootstrapper while Caesar has its eyes further set on reimplementing modules used by the bootstrapper.
Caesar also intends to provide first-class support for many client modifications, with compatibility as a focus.
skillz
...and also:
Caesar distributes raw .asar files to be dropped into an existing Discord installation. This process may be automated by the GTK installer.
If you wish to do it manually, find your install's app.asar file (you can do it, I believe in you) and copy it elsewhere, then replace it with Caesar's app.asar file.
Caesar is also distributed as a standalone Electron application that does not require a preexisting Discord installation. Various installers and portable releases are provided.
Caesar uses a mixture of TypeScript and Rust for various tools. The GTK installer and build scripts are written in Rust, and Caesar (the bootstrapper) is written in TypeScript.
Rust, Node, and npm are all expected to be installed on your system. I have not tested with any package manager other than npm because I don't care.
Gtk4 and various other libraries should be installed; this is easy on Linux, but annoying on Windows. A rust-toolchain file whose contents are just stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu has been provided, but changing the toolchain manually may be required.
You can build releases with npm run package:caesar:<your discord flavor>. Development can be done with npm run start:caesar:<your discord flavor>.
Caesar is currently licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
See COPYING.md for more information.
Footnotes
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Not all core modules will be reimplemented. Effort is required to reverse-engineer native modules. ↩
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The most notable example of this is GooseMod/OpenAsar. ↩