What is aether-gui?

Aether-GUI is a desktop application that wraps a separate command line tool called Aether, which is a censorship circumvention tunnel designed for heavily restricted networks. Aether itself finds a working route out of a blocked network, sets up an encrypted tunnel, and exposes a local proxy that other apps can use, but it only runs from a terminal. Aether-GUI puts a small animated desktop window in front of that tool so a person can just press Connect and let route discovery, setup prompts, and identity provisioning happen automatically in the background, without ever typing a command. Importantly, this project does not rebuild any of the actual tunneling logic. It runs the real Aether program in the background, answers its interactive setup questions on the user's behalf, and reads its output to show progress on screen. All of the real censorship circumvention work, including the traffic obfuscation and route probing, comes from the separate Aether project, not from this GUI. The default screen is a single button that reconnects using the last successful settings, but an advanced panel lets a more technical user choose the underlying protocol, how thoroughly to scan for a working route, which IP version to use, which transport style to disguise traffic as, and how heavily to hide the connection from network inspection. While it searches for a route the app shows a real progress bar once Aether reports its scan budget, and if the tunnel drops unexpectedly it automatically retries a limited number of times with a visible counter rather than failing silently. The app is built with Tauri, using a React and TypeScript frontend and a Rust backend that spawns the real Aether program inside a genuine pseudo terminal and passes the chosen settings as command line flags. It confirms a successful connection by actually testing that the local proxy port is reachable, rather than trusting log text alone. Right now only a Windows installer is provided, though the source can be built on macOS and Linux as well. It is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.