mads-chat

mads-chat is a small cross-platform GUI tool for inspecting and publishing messages on a MADS broker. It is built with Dear ImGui and the MADS C++ library and is mainly intended for debugging agent communication.

The window is split into two panes:

• Publish: choose a topic, edit a JSON payload with syntax highlighting, validate it, and publish it to the broker
• Receive: inspect the latest JSON received per topic, track elapsed time since the last message, and clear the current topic view

The top connection section lets you configure the host, subscribe and publish ports, subscription topics, and optional CURVE key files. The footer shows the detected MADS version and install prefix.

Package install

with MADS v2.1.1 or later, install with:

mads package --install mads-chat

Requirements

• CMake 3.24 or newer
• A C++20 compiler
• Ninja recommended as the generator
• A working MADS installation
• Network access during CMake configure, since Dear ImGui, GLFW, portable-file-dialogs, and ImGuiColorTextEdit are fetched with FetchContent

The build expects MADS to be installed already.

• The default MADS root is taken from mads -p
• Headers are expected under $(mads -p)/include
• The MADS core library is expected under:
  • macOS: $(mads -p)/lib/libMadsCore.dylib
  • Linux: $(mads -p)/lib/libMadsCore.so
  • Windows: $(mads -p)/lib/MadsCore.lib

Platform notes:

• macOS: Xcode command line tools are sufficient for building
• Linux: you need OpenGL/X11 development packages in addition to your compiler toolchain: apt install xorg libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxopen-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev
• Windows: build with Visual Studio / MSVC and ensure the MADS import library and runtime DLL are installed

Build

Configure and build with the default settings:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build

By default:

• CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is set to Release for single-config generators
• MADS_ROOT defaults to the output of mads -p
• CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX defaults to the output of mads -p

If you need a different MADS installation, override it explicitly:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DMADS_ROOT=/path/to/mads
cmake --build build

If you want a different install prefix:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/some/prefix
cmake --build build

Install

Install the executable with:

cmake --install build

This installs mads-chat into:

<install-prefix>/bin

On macOS and Linux the target is configured with runtime search paths so the installed executable can resolve the MADS core library from the selected MADS prefix.

NOTE: on Windows, enable the sudo command in Settings>PowerShell.

Run

After build:

./build/mads-chat

After install:

mads-chat

or simply:

mads chat

At startup the application reads and writes mads_multitool_settings.json in the working directory to persist the connection settings.