Later, he coded in the ability to disregard Discord’s minimum window size requirement, and to remove annoying buttons he never used. Rauen, who hopped onto the project in 2016, said he started off making a plug-in that let users with different “roles” in a server choose different colors for their names and text. At first, BetterDiscord was patching small holes in the chat app and adding new features like search. The project began just months after Discord launched in 2015. But the software has been installed more than 5.3 million times since 2015, and its developers say they have not seen Discord take action against users for modifying the client.īetterDiscord is the work of a loose group of volunteer devs, led by a 27-year-old full-time firmware engineer named Zack Rauen. BetterDiscord is not an officially sanctioned app and likely it breaks Discord’s terms of service, which prohibit modifying Discord. The experience recalls an earlier internet era, when black-and-green terminal-style Winamp skins were popular, and everything downloaded online was customizable-officially or not. You can make Discord look like it did three years ago or add in a Google Translate option. (The software doesn’t work with the mobile app or in the browser.) Your Discord window background can be the face of your favorite anime waifu, and you can delete that pesky Gift button to the right of the text box. Other changes automatically appear, like a button for perusing a list of user-submitted servers and a new emote layout.
Just download and install the free software, and then pick and choose plug-ins and skins from BetterDiscord’s database. Enter BetterDiscord.īetterDiscord allows users to tailor Discord’s desktop app to their own personal aesthetic and UX preferences, and introduces other quality-of-life improvements major and minor.
But like with any great thing, there’s room for improvement. For years, gamers have sworn up and down that Discord-not Slack-is the best desktop chat app.