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BeeBEEP — WeChat-style fork

⚠️ This is a modified version of BeeBEEP, not the original program. Original: BeeBEEP, Copyright (C) 2010-2021 Marco Mastroddi · forked from Stkai/BeeBEEP · modified by ENum (GitHub: Enumber) · licensed under GPL-3 (unchanged) · see MODIFICATIONS.md for exactly what was changed and when.

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BeeBEEP is a serverless LAN messenger: chat and send files to everyone on the same local network — office, home or a café — with no server, no account and no internet. Messages are encrypted (AES / Rijndael). It also works over VPNs.

This fork rebuilds the interface in a WeChat-like style for Chinese users and fixes several window behaviours:

• One unified search box over chats / contacts / groups — no more four bottom tabs
• Everything folded behind a single "+" button instead of a menu bar and toolbar
• Two window widths (narrow 480 px / wide 960 px), toggled by one button
• Restores its exact position when you shrink it back down
• Cannot be dragged off-screen any more
• Window transparency setting (in the "+" menu), remembered across restarts
• Closing the window asks: minimize to tray, or quit? — with "remember my choice"
• Long chat titles are elided with a tooltip instead of being silently cut off
• All added Chinese strings have English fallbacks — no mojibake on non-Chinese systems
• The About dialog states that this is a modified version, who modified it and when, and links to this repository — so anyone holding the compiled binary can find the source

Build

Requires Qt 5 and a C++ toolchain (tested on Qt 5.15.13, Ubuntu 24.04). On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential libgl1-mesa-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev \
     libxcb-screensaver0-dev qtmultimedia5-dev libqt5multimedia5-plugins \
     libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev qtbase5-dev qtchooser qt5-qmake qtbase-dev-tools

Then either run the bundled script, which is the recommended way — it cleans stale artifacts first and caps the job count at nproc - 3 so the build doesn't exhaust memory (GuiMain.cpp alone is large):

./compile.sh

or do it by hand:

qmake -o Makefile beebeep-desktop.pro
make -j$(nproc)

Either way the binary lands in test/beebeep — run it directly:

./test/beebeep

./clean_all.sh removes the build output. beebeep.pri also defines a make install target honouring PREFIX / BINDIR / DATADIR / PLUGINDIR, which installs the .desktop and AppStream metadata as well.

README-BUILD.txt and README-LINUX.txt are legacy upstream documents kept for reference. README-BUILD.txt describes a Windows / MSVC / Qt 5.5 static build and is not the path this fork uses; follow the steps above instead.

Known limitations

• The added Chinese strings are chosen at runtime from the language setting rather than through Qt's .ts translation files, so they cannot be translated with Qt Linguist, and Traditional-Chinese (tw) users are served the Simplified text.
• The optional text-marker plugins under plugins/ fail to build (pre-existing upstream issue, moc "Undefined interface"). The main program is unaffected.

Honestly…

I reworked the interface while using it day to day, so it won't match everyone's taste and there are probably rough edges I haven't hit yet. Issues and PRs very welcome 🙂

License

GPL-3, same as the original BeeBEEP — the full licence text is in COPYING, the original copyright notice in COPYRIGHT.txt. Because BeeBEEP is GPL-3 (copyleft), this modified version must stay GPL-3 as well, and all of the original author's copyright notices are preserved. What was changed, by whom and when is recorded in MODIFICATIONS.md, as GPL-3 §5(a) requires.

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Original upstream description

Fork from https://sourceforge.net/projects/beebeep/ — BeeBEEP is a secure (encryption based on Rijndael Algorithm, AES) peer to peer office messenger. You can talk and send files with all your colleagues inside a local area network such of an office, home or internet cafe without a server. BeeBEEP works also with VPNs. This serverless application is indispensable in all those places where privacy and security an essential requirement.