Published on June 1st, 2014 | by Sunit Nandi

Chat with Telegram buddies the geeky way with Telegram CLI

Telegram has grabbed the headlines for being a non-profit and open alternative to the existing mobile messengers. It is often touted as the service which has the capability to replace WhatsApp, given the features it provides:

Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.
Telegram lets you access your messages from multiple devices.
Telegram delivers messages faster than any other application.
Telegram servers are spread worldwide for security and speed.
Telegram has an open API and protocol free for everyone.
Telegram is free forever. No ads. No subscription fees.
Telegram keeps your messages safe from hacker attacks.
Telegram has no limits on the size of your media and chats.

Okay, so that was the whole point of using Telegram messenger in a gist. What we’ll be focussing on now, is its ability to be used on multiple devices, even devices (or computers) that have no GUI.

If you are one of those guys who are referred to as a developer, a hacker, an administrator or you simply need to spend a lot of time in the command-line, you know how much of a pain it is to switch between windows with the mouse to use a GUI application all of a sudden. So you’d prefer using the terminal for almost everything you can do. Your choice of messaging would definitely be irssi for IRC, and some of you might be familiar with BitlBee, which is an IRC-to-IM gateway which eliminates your need to install multiple IM software. If this is your case, read on to know how to use Telegram in the command-line.

Introducing Telegram CLI

Oh yes, you heard it right. Telegram CLI is a command-line client for Telegram, made by Vitaly Valtman. It uses the readline interface to take input from the user to perform requested actions. This client runs on Linux, BSD and Mac.

Telegram CLI’s source code is on GitHub.

Lets us proceed with the installation.

Installation

Installing from distribution repositories

On Fedora type the following into the terminal:

yum install telegram-cli

Make sure you have the latest version of Fedora (i.e. Fedora 20 at the time of writing this post).

On Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 type the following into the terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:miry/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install telegram-cli

On Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit type the following into the terminal command by command:

wget https://bugs.launchpad.net/~miry/+archive/ppa/+files/telegram-cli_0.0.20140125-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i ./telegram-cli_0.0.20140125-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

On Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit type the following into the terminal command by command:

wget https://bugs.launchpad.net/~miry/+archive/ppa/+files/telegram-cli_0.0.20140125-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i ./telegram-cli_0.0.20140125-1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

I would like to thank Miriam Ruiz for the PPA, and hence making our lives easier.

Arch Linux has the telegram-git PKGBUILD on AUR (thanks to the maintainers atweiden and trichards). If you have the yaourt utility, you can easily install it by typing the following in the terminal:

yaourt -S telegram-git

Gentoo users can use this EBUILD: http://gpo.zugaina.org/net-im/telegram-cli

All the above methods take care of the dependencies automatically.

Building Telegram CLI on Arch Linux

Installing from source

If your distribution is not listed above or if you prefer to manually compile from source, try this method.

First of all, lets install the dependencies.

On Ubuntu and Debian use:

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libconfig-dev libssl-dev lua5.2 liblua5.2-dev

On Gentoo use:

sudo emerge -av sys-libs/readline dev-libs/libconfig dev-libs/openssl dev-lang/lua

On Fedora use:

sudo yum install lua-devel openssl-devel libconfig-devel readline-devel

On Arch Linux use:

pacman -S libconfig lua

On FreeBSD use:

pkg install libconfig libexecinfo lua52

On OpenBSD use:

pkg_add libconfig libexecinfo lua

After that we need to clone the Telegram CLI GitHub repository. Make sure git is installed. Then type the following:

git clone https://github.com/vysheng/tg.git && cd tg

Alternatively you can download and extract the zip:

wget https://github.com/vysheng/tg/archive/master.zip -O tg-master.zip
unzip tg-master.zip
cd tg-master

Then, we need to run the compile process:

./configure
make

Telegram CLI will be compiled in current directory itself.

If you are on Mac OS X, you need Homebrew to install the readline library and libconfig in the following manner:

brew install libconfig
brew install readline
brew install lua
export CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.2.4/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.2.4/lib"
./configure && make

Then install these ports:

devel/libconfig
devel/libexecinfo
lang/lua52

After that, compile Telegram CLI this way:

env CC=clang CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib LUA=/usr/local/bin/lua52 LUA_INCLUDE=-I/usr/local/include/lua52 LUA_LIB=-llua-5.2
./configure
make

Telegram CLI will be compiled in current directory itself.

Now, lets try using it.

Usage

Running the application

If you installed Telegram CLI from your distribution’s repositories, launch the application by:

telegram -k /etc/telegram/tg.pub

Otherwise, if you compiled from source, run it from its directory with:

./telegram -k tg-server.pub

It will ask for your phone number. Type in the number and press ENTER. After that, a code will be generated which will be sent to your phone via SMS or chat. Type that code into the terminal when it asks for it.

Running Telegram CLI for the first time

Supported commands

The application supports TAB completion and command history.

Also, the official documentation states the definition of ‘peers’ :

“Peer refers to the name of the contact or dialog and can be accessed by TAB completion. For user contacts peer name is Name Lastname with all spaces changed to underscores. For chats it is it’s title with all spaces changed to underscores For encrypted chats it is Name Lastname with all spaces changed to underscores.

If two or more peers have same name, number is appended to the name. (for example A_B, A_B#1, A_B#2 and so on)”

The supported commands are (from ‘help’ command):

‘help’ command

Messaging

msg <peer> Text – sends message to this peer
fwd <user> <msg-seqno> – forward message to user. You can see message numbers starting client with -N
chat_with_peer <peer> starts one on one chat session with this peer. /exit or /quit to end this mode.
add_contact <phone-number> <first-name> <last-name> – tries to add contact to contact-list by phone
rename_contact <user> <first-name> <last-name> – tries to rename contact. If you have another device it will be a fight
mark_read <peer> – mark read all received messages with peer

Multimedia

send_photo <peer> <photo-file-name> – sends photo to peer
send_video <peer> <video-file-name> – sends video to peer
send_text <peer> <text-file-name> – sends text file as plain messages
load_photo/load_video/load_video_thumb <msg-seqno> – loads photo/video to download dir
view_photo/view_video/view_video_thumb <msg-seqno> – loads photo/video to download dir and starts system default viewer

Group chat options

chat_info <chat> – prints info about chat
chat_add_user <chat> <user> – add user to chat
chat_del_user <chat> <user> – remove user from chat
rename_chat <chat> <new-name>
create_group_chat <user> <chat topic> – creates a groupchat with user, use chat_add_user to add more users

Search

search <peer> pattern – searches pattern in messages with peer
global_search pattern – searches pattern in all messages

Secret chat

create_secret_chat <user> – creates secret chat with this user
visualize_key <secret_chat> – prints visualization of encryption key. You should compare it to your partner’s one

Stats and various info

user_info <user> – prints info about user
history <peer> [limit] – prints history (and marks it as read). Default limit = 40
dialog_list – prints info about your dialogs
contact_list – prints info about users in your contact list
suggested_contacts – print info about contacts, you have max common friends
stats – just for debugging
show_license – prints contents of GPLv2
help – prints this help

Experience

Telegram CLI is pretty full-featured even though it is marked as ‘beta’. It does everything what the official mobile client does. Multimedia sending and secret chats work as expected. Chatting with buddies makes one nostalgic of the good ol’ CLI (read DOS) days.

Displaying details for a contact

Viewing the chat history

Chatting with a buddy

The client is a bit too verbose with status messages while chatting, which I think could have been reduced to a certain extent, which in turn, will make the output look a lot cleaner.

Nevertheless, it works perfectly and I do not have any more complaints.

Conclusion

Telegram CLI is a pretty handy tool if you are use the terminal a lot and too often. It frees you from having to move the mouse to switch windows or lifting your phone from your pocket to reply to your friends in the midst of work. Combined with the GNU screen utility, you’ll have the ability to chat with your friends and develop/administer at the same time. Such is the convenience of having an open mobile messenger platform that WhatsApp, Hike, WeChat, Line, etc. cannot offer.

If setting up a CLI client is too hard for you, you can give Webogram a try. It works right inside a browser and is also available as a Chrome app. However, it lacks support for secret chats and many other features.

I hope that this guide has helped you. If you have anything to suggest, feel free to leave a comment.

If you have trouble setting up and using Telegram CLI, you can open a discussion on our forum or Facebook group and I’ll try my best to help you out.

Don’t have the requirements to try out this guide? You can use a really cheap Linux/Unix virtual machine on the DigitalOcean cloud to try Telegram CLI out.

Thank you for reading this article. Make a great day!

Tags: CLI, command line, libconfig, liblua, lua, messaging, readline, Telegram

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.