If, like me, you spend a lot of time in the command line, you might find that using your social media / chat apps via the terminal might be beneficial to you. Enter nchat, which provides WhatsApp and Telegram functionality via an ncurses display. It works on Linux as well as Mac (via brew).

To download the nchat application on a Debian/Ubuntu system, follow the following steps, or for other distributions, follow the guides on the github page at https://github.com/d99kris/nchat:

sudo apt install ccache cmake build-essential gperf help2man libreadline-dev libssl-dev libncurses-dev libncursesw5-dev ncurses-doc zlib1g-dev libsqlite3-dev libmagic-dev golang git

then download the source code from the git repository:

git clone https://github.com/d99kris/nchat.git

compile the source:

mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake .. && make -s

then install the application to the system:

sudo make install

The app works very well through the WhatsApp & Telegram API and also has the following rich features:

Jump to unread chat

Message read receipt

Customisable color schemes and key bindings

Message history cache with support for text export

Receive / send markdown formatted messages

Reply / delete / edit / send messages

List dialogs for selecting files, emojis, contacts

Show user status (online, away, typing)

View / save media files (documents, photos, videos)

Send and display reactions

Toggle to view text emojis vs. graphical

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