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a minimal, distraction-free chat application

From hack-chat·Updated June 14, 2026·View on GitHub·

[hack.chat](https://hack.chat/) is a minimal, distraction-free, accountless, logless, disappearing chat service which is easily deployable as your own service. The current client comes bundled with LaTeX rendering provided by [KaTeX](https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX) and code syntax highlighting provided by [highlight.js](https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js). The project is written primarily in JavaScript, first published in 2018. It has gained significant community traction with 1,436 stars and 245 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: anonymous, chat, javascript, nodejs, websockets.

hack.chat

hack.chat is a minimal, distraction-free, accountless, logless, disappearing chat service which is easily deployable as your own service. The current client comes bundled with LaTeX rendering provided by KaTeX and code syntax highlighting provided by highlight.js.

A list of software developed for the hack.chat framework can be found at the 3rd party software list repository. This includes bots, clients, docker containers, etc.

This is a backwards compatible continuation of the work by Andrew Belt. The server code has been updated to ES6 along with several new features including new commands and hot-reload of the commands/protocol. There is also documentation.

Installation

Prerequisites

Developer Installation

  1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/hack-chat/main.git
  2. Change the directory: cd main
  3. Install the dependencies: npm install
  4. Launch: npm start

Live Deployment Installation

See DEPLOY.md

Contributing

  • Use two space indents.
  • Name files in camelCase.

Credits

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

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This article is auto-generated from hack-chat/main via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/19/2026