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
• 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, upgrading basicgroup to supergroup
• 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, hashtags, 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, Poll creation
• Handling local links, such as "tg:" or "https://t.me/xxx" (PARTLY)
• ReplyMarkup (inline keyboard buttons) in the messages (PARTLY)
• InstantView for web pages
• Blocking/Unblocking users, listing blocked users
• Inline bots requests, via "@bot query"
• Searching for messages in chat
• Shared media
• Traffic control, see telega#62
• TranslationsPlatform support
• Delayed messages, see TDLib#695
• Cloud themes, see TDLib#691

Unique features

• Expressive ibuffer-like chats filtering
• Custom order for chats (some chats on top, some chats on bottom, etc)
• Labeled chats, you can assign custom label to chat
• Client side messages filtering
• Get diff for the message edits, see screenshot

Screenshots

Channels only chats filtered in root buffer:

Chat in @emacs_en group:

Attaching funny cat sticker:

Installation

telega.el depends on visual-fill-column package. This dependency automatically installs if you install telega from MELPA. Otherwise you need to install this package by hand.

telega.el is built on top of the official library provided by Telegram TDLib 1.5.0. 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 1.5.0 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

It will install headers to /usr/local/include and library itself into /usr/local/lib. These paths are hardcoded in telega.el.

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

It will also install headers to /usr/local/include and library into /usr/local/lib.

Installing telega.el from MELPA

telega.el already in MELPA, so you can install it from there as usual package. This method is preferable, because it will handle all dependencies. After installing telega.el from MELPA you can skip to Fire up telega.el section.

Or you could use git repository or this melpa-style recipe:

(:fetcher github
 :repo "zevlg/telega.el"
 :branch "master"
 :files (:defaults "etc" "server" "Makefile"))

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, or just let telega ask you at the first start and do the job.

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.

Minor modes

telega-mode-line-mode

Minor mode to display telega status in modeline. To enable it use

(telega-mode-line-mode 1)

telega-notifications-mode

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:

(telega-notifications-mode 1)

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 ()
            (set (make-local-variable 'company-backends)
                 (append '(telega-company-emoji
                           telega-company-username
                           telega-company-hashtag)
                         (when (telega-chat-bot-p telega-chatbuf--chat)
                           '(telega-company-botcmd))))
            (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've got the error installing telega

Cannot open load file: No such file or directory, visual-fill-column

A: telega.el depends on visual-fill-column package, please install it first. This package is available from MELPA

Q: I've got error, while running telega

(error "Invalid image type ‘svg’")

and/or

(error "Invalid image type ‘imagemagick’")

A: telega.el requires Emacs with SVG and ImageMagick support. SVG support in Emacs is done using librsvg library. As to imagemagick, you will need libmagickcore-dev and libmagickwand-dev packages installed. But unfortunately Emacs recently disabled imagemagick support by default (see https://lists.gnu.org/r/emacs-devel/2018-12/msg00036.html). So you need to compile Emacs by hand, specifying --with-imagemagick flag to ./configure script.

Telega won't depend on imagemagick in future, since required image features has been added to newer Emacs, see https://lists.gnu.org/r/emacs-devel/2019-06/msg00242.html

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: Stickers are not shown.

A: Make sure you have imagemagick support and please install webp package

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.

Q: Is it possible to use telega.el in tty-only Emacs (aka emacs-nox)?

A: Yes, set telega-use-images to nil, before start.