Zorrent pulls files down and gets out of the way. Native binary, hand-written protocol engine, no accounts, no telemetry — a 2.6 MB download-only client.
A sidebar and a list. Drop a .torrent, paste a magnet or a YouTube link, and it starts — no dashboards, no onboarding.
Every claim looks at which piece the fewest connected peers have and takes that one, with ties broken at random so the swarm doesn't collapse onto the same piece. Up to 40 peer connections per torrent, 64 block requests pipelined per connection.
Overlapped (async) I/O on Windows, standard buffered file I/O on macOS. Piece hashing runs off the UI thread on a dedicated pool, so verifying a large torrent doesn't freeze the window while the disk is busy.
There's no sign-in, no analytics, and no phone-home beyond checking a version file for updates. Everything Zorrent needs to remember — settings, progress, what you've downloaded — lives in a plain local folder. Note: the peer wire protocol itself isn't encrypted (no MSE/PE), and there's no per-interface kill switch — if you need either, Zorrent isn't the right tool yet.
Enough to find peers and pull data reliably. No PEX, no µTP, no v2/hybrid torrents, no WebSeed, no wire encryption — those aren't implemented yet.
Drag it to Applications on macOS, run the installer on Windows. No package manager, no update daemon in your login items. macOS and Windows today; Linux when it is actually ready.