crashcoredump / telega.el

GNU Emacs telegram client (unofficial)

telega.el

telega.el is full featured unofficial client for Telegram platform for GNU Emacs.

telega.el is actively developed, for this reason, some features are not implemented, or they are present just as skeleton for future implementation. However, the core parts are mature enough so that it is possible to use telega.el for basic chat.

Features

In some random order:

• Listing chats, reordering chats according to internal Telegram order
• Custom order for chats (some chats on top, some chats on bottom, etc)
• Expressive ibuffer-like chats filtering
• Getting info about users, groups and supergroups
• Joining chats by invitation link M-x telega-chat-join-by-link RET
• Fetching chat history, sending messages, replies, edits, deleting
• Resend failed messages (see TDLib#166)
• Creating new groups
• Forwarding messages
• D-Bus notifications on incoming messages in chats with enabled notifications
• VoIP calls, including D-Bus call notification
• Downloading files from the cloud
• Uploading files/media (also pasting images from clipboard) to the cloud
• Display chat actions, such as "@user is typing..."
• Display/Update chat's draft message
• Company backends for emoji (:<emoji> syntax), usernames, bot commands completions
• Secret chats
• Online global searching chats/contacts/messages
• Avatars, Photos, Stickers
• Animated GIF, via ffplay
• Special messages such as location/live location, voice/video messages, contacts, etc (PARTLY)
• Poll messages
• Handling local links, such as "tg:" or "https://t.me/xxx" (PARTLY)
• ReplyMarkup (inline keyboard buttons) in the messages (PARTLY)
• InstantView for web pages
• Searching for messages in chat
• Shared media
• Inline bots requests
• TranslationsPlatform support

Screenshots

Channels only chats filtered in root buffer:

Chat in @emacs_en group:

Attaching funny cat sticker:

Installation

Being in active development, telega.el is not ready to be distributed on archives such as MELPA. At the moment, the only way to use is from this git repository. This involves few simple steps described below.

telega.el is built on top of the official library provided by Telegram TDLib 1.4.0. Most of the distributions do not package this libary, so it has to be build from source.

Dependences

• GNU Emacs (at least 26.1 is required)
• GNU make
• GNU gperf
• CMake

make is found in most of the modern machines. The other packages can be download with the system package manager (such as apt for Debian-based distributions, dnf for Fedora or pacman for Arch-based).

MacOS users

1. If you are using Emacs For Mac OS X, or you installed Emacs by running brew cask install emacs, your Emacs lacks svg support, so you cannot use telega. Please switch to emacs-plus

2. If you are using Emacs-mac, or you installed Emacs by running brew install emacs-mac or brew cask install emacs-mac, your Emacs has bug dealing with complex svg, which leads to Emacs hangup. Until the bug is fixed, consider switching to emacs-plus

3. emacs-plus is the best choice to run telega.

Linux users

telega.el requires at least GNU Emacs 26.1 with imagemagick and svg support.

Building tdlib

TDLib is the library for building Telegram clients. It requires a large amount of memory to be built. Make sure you are using 1.4.0 TDLib version.

On MacOS you can install pre-build tdlib package using homebrew from brew.sh. Just run:

$ brew install tdlib

On Linux you need build tdlib from sources.

To get the source:

$ git clone https://github.com/tdlib/td.git

Move into the folder with cd td

Prepare a folder for building the library:

$ mkdir build && cd build && cmake ../

Build the sources:

$ make -jN

with N number of cores that should be used for the compilation (the optimal value is the number of physical cores on the machine).

Finally, to install the library system-wide:

$ sudo make install

Building libtgvoip

VoIP support in telega.el is optional, if you don't need VoIP, just ignore this section.

libtgvoip is the VoIP library for telegram clients. This is the fork from original library with patches needed by telega.el.

To get the source:

$ git clone https://github.com/zevlg/libtgvoip.git

Move into the folder with cd libtgvoip

Prepare a folder for building the library:

$ autoreconf --force --install && ./configure && make

Install the library system-wide:

$ sudo make install

Building telega-server

Now that the tdlib library is set-up, it is time to install telega.el. The first step consists in building telega-server, which is a C interface to the tdlib.

To get the source:

$ git clone https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el

Moving into the folder with cd telega.el, it is possible to build the telega-server executable and move into the $HOME/.telega with:

$ make && make install && make test

If you want VoIP support in telega.el and libtgvoip is installed, then use this instead:

$ make WITH_VOIP=t && make WITH_VOIP=t install && make WITH_VOIP=t test

This command does not require superuser privileges.

Start with M-x telega RET and follow instructions

Installing telega.el

Now it is time to install telega.el on GNU Emacs.

This can be done with use-package:

(use-package telega
  :load-path  "~/telega.el"
  :commands (telega)
  :defer t)

Or with:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/telega.el")
(require 'telega)

The code should be put in the configuration file for Emacs, which usually is init.el, or emacs.el.

Fire up telega.el

telega.el can now be started with M-x telega RET. The first time it ask for the phone number to login to the Telegram network.

Enabling D-Bus notifications

telega.el ships with support for D-Bus notifications, but they are disabled by default. To enable notifications add next code to your init.el:

(setq telega-use-notifications t)

Enabling emoji completions in chat buffer

Emoji completions with :<EMOJI-NAME>: syntax, uses nice company-mode. It provides telega-company-emoji company backend. So you need to add it to company-backends, maybe along with other backends in telega-chat-mode-hook, for example:

(add-hook telega-chat-mode-hook (lambda ()
    (setq company-backends '(telega-company-emoji))
    (company-mode 1)))

Configuring client side messages filtering

In official telegram clients all messages in group chats are displayed even if message has been sent by blocked user. telega.el has client side message filtering feature implemented. Ignoring messages can be done via installing special functions into telega-chat-pre-message-hook which could mark message as ignored, for example, to ignore messages from particular user with id=12345 you could add next code:

(defun my-telega-ignore-12345-user (msg &rest notused)
  (when (= (plist-get msg :sender_user_id) 12345)
    (telega-msg-ignore msg)))

(add-hook 'telega-chat-pre-message-hook 'my-telega-ignore-12345-user)

Or to ignore messages from blocked users, just add:

(add-hook 'telega-chat-pre-message-hook 'telega-msg-ignore-blocked-sender)

To view recent messages that has been ignored use M-x telega-ignored-messages RET command.

How to contribute

Join our Telegram group to discuss the development of telega.el.

Submitting issues is exceptionally helpful.

License

telega.el is licensed under GNU GPL version 3.

FAQ

Q: I got the error after M-x telega RET

Status: telega-server: exited abnormally with code 127
/home/user/.telega/telega-server: error while loading shared libraries:
libtdjson.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A: Add /usr/local/lib into library loading path using next:

# echo "/usr/local/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/usr_local_lib.conf
# ldconfig

Q: I'm from Russia, does telega.el has proxy support?

A: Yes, use telega-proxies custom variable, for example:

(setq telega-proxies
      (list
       '(:server "1.2.3.4" :port 8080 :enable :false
                 :type (:@type "proxyTypeSocks5"
                               :username "rkn" :password "jopa"))
       '(:server "2.3.4.5" :port 8088 :enable t
                 :type (:@type "proxyTypeSocks5"
                               :username "rkn" :password "jopa"))
       ))

See C-h v telega-proxies RET for full range of proxy types.

Q: No glyphs for some unicode characters.

A: Please install fonts-symbola package

Q: There is some formatting issues when some unicode characters are used. Is there way to fix it up?

A: Yes, partly. If character has full width of multiple ordinary chars you can tweak char-width-table. Add code like this to your init.el:

(setq telega-symbol-unread "🄌")

(defun my-telega-load ()
  ;; 🄌 occupies two full chars, but (string-width "🄌") returns 1
  ;; so we install custom widths to `char-width-table'
  (telega-symbol-set-width telega-symbol-unread 2)

  ;; ... other code
  )

(add-hook 'telega-load-hook 'my-telega-load)

There is also telega-symbol-widths custom variable, you might want to modify it.

Q: Is there erc-like chats tracking functionality?

A: Yes, set telega-use-tracking to non-nil.

Take into account that telega tracks only opened chats with enabled notifications.