By Demir Yerli in Quadrant —

The blog is back up.

Here's a summary of things that happened since April.

Better modpack sharing and compatibility

Quadrant can now share modpacks through links instead of requiring users to exchange full ZIP files. Shared modpacks use the newer modConfigV2 format, which preserves richer metadata such as mod names, versions, descriptions, thumbnails, and provider information.

Modpack collaboration invites are also handled more reliably, and imported manifests are normalized for better compatibility between versions.

A completely redesigned search experience

The search page was rebuilt around a unified Modrinth and CurseForge experience. Users can now:

  • Search mods, resource packs, and shader packs.
  • Sort results by relevance, downloads, name, or update date.
  • Filter by Minecraft version, mod loader, provider, and categories.
  • Use newly supported Modrinth loaders, including Babric, BTA (Babric), Java Agent, Legacy Fabric, Ornithe, Rift, and others.
  • Collapse filter groups and keep their filter preferences between sessions.
  • Browse paginated results more efficiently.
  • Choose a specific modpack as the installation target.

Selecting a modpack automatically adopts its Minecraft version and loader, making search results ready to install into that pack.

A more compact and flexible interface

The default interface is now smaller and better suited to laptops, smaller displays, and narrow windows. The navigation bar has been redesigned around compact icon buttons, and the minimum window size has been reduced.

Users can adjust the interface scale from 50% to 200%, choose between Compact and Classic presets, or use familiar Ctrl/Cmd zoom shortcuts. The selected scale is persisted and included in settings synchronization.

macOS support

Quadrant is now available for macOS for Apple Silicon. The app correctly locates the macOS Minecraft directory, uses a native macOS icon and bundle name, and supports native window decorations.

More deployment options

Packaging and distribution have been improved across platforms:

  • Added an Arch User Repository workflow.
  • Improved Flatpak packaging and GNOME runtime compatibility.
  • Improved Microsoft Store builds and diagnostics.
  • Added better ARM build support and release automation.
  • Updated application metadata, screenshots, and platform manifests.

Under-the-hood improvements

The desktop architecture was reorganized around a shared runtime contract, separating the React interface from platform-specific desktop services. Core Minecraft and modpack functionality now lives in reusable Rust crates, improving maintainability and enabling alternative consumers such as the Node/N-API integration.

There were also numerous dependency updates, security fixes, packaging fixes, and stability improvements throughout the 26.5-26.7 releases.

Electron dropped

Beyond that, the Electron experiment turned out to be more of a burden, rather than a solution to WebKit's problems. It introduced a lot of instabilities that I've noticed in my personal use of Quadrant, which lead me to the decision to drop it and go back to maintaining only one seam between the frontend and the backend.

With that said, I still haven't dropped the idea of having an alternative way to bundle Quadrant in the future, therefore I didn't remove the separation between the quadrant , quadrant-core , quadrant-napi and quadrant-host crates. All of them should still be functional. (Although, not much have has been given to maintain the napi crate).

Supporting other runtimes is certainly a thing I'm contemplating on revisiting in case if Tauri 3.0 doesn't bring CEF support to macOS/Linux.

Thanks to AI

A lot of the work completed within the past few months wouldn't have been possible/as fast if not for the help of Claude/Codex. I know that a lot of people really like to shit on AI code, however we have to give credit where it's due: AI is very useful if you guide it properly. In hands of people who know what they want AI is not a "slop machine", it's a powerful tool. I wanted to revamp the search for a LONG while now, however I haven't had the time to actually deal with it. Same goes for 90% of the bug fixes that were landed recently. I'm just one person who has school, an internship and university applications to worry about. If not for the opportunity to spend more time directing and being more creative with the project, I wouldn't have had the ability to actually implement and write those changes alone.

It's not perfect though. AI isn't flawless and neither is any piece of software. If y'all find any bugs or have suggestions, I'm always open to ideas on GitHub. Feel free to report any issues that you find or ideas that you think would be actually nice to implement.

Shout out to my friend, who helped me find a bunch of UI/UX problems, bugs and etc thanks to his fresh perspective.