You should check out reticulum if you haven’t already. More use cases than just messaging.

You protect your api server side, not client side.

Are you using KDE? I’ve recently switched to KDE to try it out after using gnome for nearly two decades and have come across this annoyance.

It searches the first letter then waits for a pause in typing before searching again which has slowed down my workflow significantly.

This seems to be the bug report regarding the issue: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455239