mist

Mist was a desktop browser designed for the Ethereum blockchain network. Its main purpose was to let people browse and use decentralized applications, sometimes called Dapps, which are programs that run on the Ethereum network rather than on a central server. It also functioned as an Ethereum wallet, meaning you could store and send Ether (the Ethereum currency) from within the same application. This project is now officially deprecated and is no longer maintained.

The application was built using Electron, which is a framework for creating desktop apps using web technology. The interface was built with Meteor, a JavaScript web framework, and bundled into a static package for each release. When you ran Mist, it also ran an Ethereum node (called geth) in the background to connect to the network and kept that node up to date automatically.

Mist was available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You could download a pre-built installer from the releases page and run it directly without any development setup. For those who wanted to connect to an existing node rather than run their own, there was a command-line flag to point Mist at an existing geth process. You could also run it in wallet-only mode rather than the full browser mode.

For developers contributing to the project, the setup involved running a Meteor development server alongside the Electron shell, with live reload during development. The build system used gulp and electron-builder to produce distribution packages for each platform. Tests were run with Spectron, a testing tool built for Electron applications.

Because the project is deprecated, it should not be used for managing real funds or interacting with the Ethereum network today. More recent Ethereum wallet and browser tools have replaced it.