Lupinus

Native cross-platform VNC + RDP client.

Website: https://alplix.github.io/lupinus/ (available in 38 languages) · Download: latest release

Lupinus connects to VNC and RDP servers and gives you a fast, native-feeling remote desktop viewer — no browser tab, no Electron, just a small native window built with Go + Wails v2.

Features

Area	What you can do
Protocols	VNC (RFB 3.3 / 3.7 / 3.8) and RDP, from one app
VNC security	None, VNC Authentication, and Apple Remote Desktop (username + password) — which is what macOS Screen Sharing uses
VNC encodings	Raw, CopyRect, ZRLE and Tight (with JPEG), plus DesktopSize and Cursor pseudo-encodings
RDP	TLS with trust-on-first-use certificate pinning, NLA / CredSSP sign-in, GDI drawing orders, two-way clipboard
Slow links	Colour depth (32 / 16 / 8-bit) tunes itself to the connection, only changed pixels reach the viewer, and pointer traffic is coalesced — see Adaptive quality
Sessions	Several sessions open at once, automatic reconnect after a dropped connection
Saved connections	Name, host, port, username and colour tag stored locally, with import / export. Passwords never touch disk — they live in the OS keychain (Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, Linux Secret Service)
Live viewer	Fit / actual-size / stretch scaling that follows window resizes, two-way clipboard, full keyboard and pointer passthrough, Ctrl+Alt+Del
Languages	38 UI languages (including right-to-left scripts), chosen from the OS locale or in Settings
Theme	Light and dark

Adaptive quality

Some servers — macOS Screen Sharing above all — answer the smallest change with a full-screen, lossless frame (5+ MB at Retina resolution). Over the internet that used to make a session unusable, so Lupinus adapts on its own: it measures the link, picks the best of 32 / 16 / 8-bit colour whose full-screen frame fits a time budget, and climbs back up when the link recovers. Settings → VNC quality only picks how aggressive that is (High quality pins 32-bit colour).

Platforms

Every release is built by GitHub Actions and published with SHA256SUMS.txt.

OS	Architectures	Packaging	Notes
Windows 10/11	x64, ARM64	NSIS installer + portable zip	WebView2 required at runtime (bundled by the installer)
Windows	32-bit (x86)	portable zip	no installer for 32-bit
macOS	universal (Intel + Apple silicon)	.app bundle (zip)
Linux	x64, ARM64, ARM 32-bit	portable .tar.gz	GTK3 + WebKitGTK 4.1 required

Getting started

1. Open New Connection, pick VNC or RDP, and enter the server's host and port (5900 for VNC, 3389 for RDP). For a Mac, turn on Screen Sharing in System Settings and sign in with your Mac username and password.
2. Save it to reuse later — Lupinus stores the password in your OS keychain, never in a plaintext config file — or just Quick Connect without saving anything.
3. Once connected, use the viewer toolbar to switch scaling modes, sync your clipboard, send Ctrl+Alt+Del, or switch theme.

Connection metadata is stored in the OS config directory (~/.config/lupinus on Linux, %APPDATA%\lupinus on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/lupinus on macOS).

Building from source

Prerequisites:

• Go 1.26+
• Wails CLI (go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest)
• Node.js 20+ (frontend tooling)

On Linux you also need the Wails WebKit/GTK dependencies (libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev). On Windows, WebView2 is required at runtime (bundled by the installer).

wails dev     # live development build
wails build   # production build for the current platform

Cross-compiling for release targets is handled by the CI pipelines:

• .github/workflows/ci.yml — version-sync check, vet, tests and a Linux smoke build on every PR/push
• .github/workflows/release.yml — tagged releases (vX.Y.Z) for Windows (x64, ARM64, 32-bit), macOS (universal) and Linux (x64, ARM64, ARM 32-bit) with checksums

Manual cross-build example (Linux host)

# Windows amd64 (+ NSIS installer)
wails build -platform windows/amd64 -nsis -webview2 download

# Linux arm64
wails build -platform linux/arm64

Architecture

frontend/                 Vite + vanilla JS/CSS single-page UI
  src/viewer.js            canvas rendering, scaling, input capture, clipboard bridge
  src/keysym.js             DOM KeyboardEvent -> X11 keysym mapping
  wailsjs/                  generated bindings to the Go API

internal/rfb/               RFB client: handshake, VNC/Apple auth, Raw/CopyRect/ZRLE/Tight decoding, adaptive colour depth
internal/rdp/               RDP client: TLS + NLA/CredSSP, bitmap/GDI decoding, clipboard
internal/store/              connections, settings, pinned certificates; passwords in the OS keyring
internal/wsbridge/           local WebSocket bridge carrying framebuffer/input between Go and the webview
site/, docs/                 the project website: sources (template + 38 translations) and generated GitHub Pages output
internal/version/            single source of truth for the version number and branding strings
app.go                       Wails-bound API surface (connections, live sessions, settings)
main.go                      tray icon + window lifecycle, single-instance lock

Releasing

internal/version/version.go's Version constant is the single source of truth for the Lupinus version number — unlike some older sibling projects that hand-edit the version in three different places, everything else is derived from it.

1. Bump Version in internal/version/version.go.
2. Run node scripts/sync-version.mjs — it stamps wails.json's info.productVersion and frontend/package.json's version to match, and prints what it changed. CI re-runs this script and fails the build if anything is out of sync, so don't skip it.
3. Commit the changes.
4. git tag vX.Y.Z && git push origin vX.Y.Z — this triggers release.yml, which builds every platform and publishes a GitHub release with SHA256SUMS.txt alongside the archives.

Roadmap

Not yet implemented — contributions welcome:

• Hextile encoding and VeNCrypt / TLS for VNC
• File transfer
• Multi-monitor / multi-display sessions
• Audio redirection

Website

The site at https://alplix.github.io/lupinus/ is plain HTML/CSS/JS served by GitHub Pages from docs/. Every language is its own pre-rendered page (/, /tr/, /de/, …) with a translated title and description, hreflang links, structured data and a sitemap, so search engines can index each one. docs/ is generated — edit the sources and rebuild:

node scripts/build-site.mjs   # site/template.html + site/i18n/*.json  ->  docs/

To add or fix a translation, edit site/i18n/<lang>.json (copy en.json for a new language and add the language to the list in scripts/build-site.mjs). CI fails if docs/ is out of date. The app's own strings live in frontend/src/locales/.

Author

Coded by Alperen Yavuz

Support

If Lupinus is useful to you and you'd like to support its development:

Support Lupinus

License

MIT — see LICENSE.