Sclid - a signal interface for your terminal*

It no longer works and I will no longer work on it, so it’s archived.

this was inspired by scli and uses a (highly) modified version of signal-cli

*if your terminal is kitty - not guaranteed to work on other terminals.

Installation

Dependencies

JRE 10 or above - it’s bad enough working with java, at least let me have a modern(ish) version,
dmd or another d compiler, if you want to use another modify DC in the Makefile
w3imgdisplay - for showing images - in the future other protocols might be available,
pnglatex - for muh \LaTeX - not optional,
ranger - for selecting attachments,
sqlite3 - for storing the message history - even if you don’t store message to disk (which you probably shouldn’t) you need this,
xclip - for copying messages to clipboard,
feh and qrencode - only needed for the setup,
by the default you need a powerline patched font. you could edit config.d to replace those characters,
some sort of editor - you probably have at least nano or something.

Btw i use arch

sudo pacman -S jre11-openjdk dmd w3m ranger sqlite3 xclip feh qrencode

pnglatex is only available in the aur. So replace yay with your aur helper of choice.

yay -S pnglatex

Downloading

The easy part:

clone this to a directory of your choice

git clone https://github.com/azbyn/sclid

Building

Before doing anything you should go to dlang/config.d and edit things there. This is customized to work on my machine and might not work on yours. (or there might be things i want, but you don’t (like the storing of messages part)

While this is a valid dub project, you shouldn’t run dub for building, that’s only for testing the ui without waiting for signal (the java bit) to load up.

You could build it in release mode, but you shouldn’t do that yet. There ~~might be~~ are bugs, and you wouldn’t know what went wrong.

The actual instructions

make -j2
sudo make install

First setup (this is avoided if you configured signal-cli before)

sclid YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER

Where you should replace YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER with your full phone number (natürlich) (something like +1234567890)

When the qr code shows up (you should respond with y before that), on your phone’s Signal app go to Settings > Linked Devices scan the code.

You should now be see some windows.

You should type :sync to sync your contacts.

Using it afterwards

if you only have one user setup, you can do:

sclid

otherwise just:

sclid YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER

Quick terminology

Minubuffer that bit at the bottom with the : that you open with : or M-x
ContactsWindow the one on the left
MessagesWindow the one that has the messages
InputWindow where you write the message - below messages

Keybindings

There are vim-like and emacs-like keybindings. You’ll figure it out. (look in dlang/graphics/windowBase.d replaceSimilar and in dlang/graphics/inputWindow.d loop for a full list)

Something that might be useful is that in InputWindow Alt+enter adds a new line but doesn’t send the message.

In the MinibufferWindow (that bit at the bottom with the :) you can use these commands:

quit for quitting,
sync for syncing (you already know that one),
reply replies to the message you highlighted with your cursor in MessagesWindow
unreply to quit out of the replying
attach for attaching files
edit to edit the message in your favorite editor
react react to message you highlighted. If used alone it removes the reaction. Otherwise you should append laugh, up, down, wow, angry, heart or sad, which do what they sound like they do.
copy for copying the current message to the clipboard

(look in dlang/graphics/minibuffer.d for a full list)

azbyn / sclid