README.md

telega.el

telega.el is an unofficial client for Telegram platform for GNU Emacs.

telega.el is in its very alpha stages and it is actively developed. For this reason, many features are not implemented, or they are present just as skeleton for future implementation. However, the core parts of this major-mode are mature enough so that it is possible to use telega.el for basic chat.

Features

• Listing chats, reordering chats according to internal Telegram order
• Expressive ibuffer-like chats filtering
• Getting info about users, groups and supergroups
• Fetching chat history, sending messages, replies
• D-Bus notifications on incoming messages in chats with enabled notifications
• Downloading files from the cloud
• Emoji support (only in GNU Emacs with surrogate pairs support, see Bug#24784)
• Secret chats
• Online searching chats/messages
• Avatars, photos
• Stickers
• Animated GIF
• Special messages such as location/live location, voice/video messages, etc
• ReplyMarkup (inline keyboard buttons) in the messages
• InstantView for web pages

Screenshots

Chat buffer and combination of root buffer/chat buffer running under iOS terminal blink:

telega.el running under GUI version of Emacs:

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 repositary. This involves few simple steps described below.

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

Dependences

• GNU Emacs
• 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).

Building tdlib

tdlib is the backed used to communicate with the servers. It requires a large amount of memory to be built.

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

Now that the 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.

Building telega-server

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

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.

How to contribute

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

License

telega.el is licensed under GNU GPL version 3.