tglow

Messages look like messages

Links, bold, code, strikethrough and code blocks render as themselves. Spoilers stay masked until you ask.

Nothing is lost while you are away

Messages sent while tglow was closed are recovered on launch, not silently skipped — the part most terminal clients quietly omit.

Your text survives a failure

A send that fails leaves what you typed exactly where it was. Delete asks first, every time, because a mistyped dd cannot be undone.

The block turns red and every other key is ignored until you answer.

You can fix a typo where it is

The caret moves through what you are writing, so a wrong letter in the middle of a message costs one ←, not deleting the rest of the sentence. It steps by whole characters — ế is one press to cross and one backspace to remove, never half a letter.

It speaks your language

Vietnamese, CJK and emoji measure and wrap correctly. nguyen finds Nguyễn Tấn Phát — diacritics optional.

Logs never touch the screen

Diagnostics go to a file. The alternate screen belongs to the interface, so nothing ever prints over a frame.

One binary

No runtime to install, no node_modules. Database migrations are compiled in, so a fresh machine needs only the executable.

It uses the room it has

Give it a wide window and your messages move to the right, theirs stay left. Narrow it and everything returns to one column — right-aligning in a cramped pane costs the text the room it has least of. Your Telegram folders sit above the chat list, and ]f moves between them.

Pictures, not drawings of pictures

Photos and stickers go to the terminal as pixels — the Kitty graphics protocol in kitty, Ghostty and WezTerm; Sixel in foot, GNOME Terminal and Contour. Where a terminal has neither, chafa draws them and O opens the original outside.

More than one conversation

<C-w>\ puts a chat in a new column, <C-w>- stacks one underneath, and <C-w>hjkl moves between them. The panes you are not in stay live and keep their own scroll position — but only the focused one has a composer, so Enter is never ambiguous.

It tells you when there is a newer one

One request a day, and :update installs it — the published checksum is fetched first and has to match, or nothing is written. update_check = false if you would rather it never asked; it is the only request tglow makes to anything other than Telegram.

It does not misrepresent itself

A dropped connection shows, rather than looking like a quiet afternoon. A rate limit says wait 30s and holds the next send back, instead of handing you FLOOD_WAIT_30 and letting the retry extend it. And a launch draws your chats from the local cache in well under a second, rather than a blank terminal for two and a half.

The next unread chat is one key

]u goes to it and opens it, so holding it walks through everything waiting — opening marks a chat read, which is what makes the next press find the next one. [u goes back. Within the folder you are looking at, because that is your own statement of what you are looking at.

Read state that keeps up

A tick becomes two the moment they read you. Read a chat on your phone and the badge here stops counting it — following Telegram's own figure, so a partial read shows what is genuinely left.

Your colours, not its own

Twelve devglow palettes ship. Drop a .toml in ~/.config/tglow/themes/ for your own, and a file there overrides a built-in of the same name. A theme with a typo in it is never applied half-way — tglow says so and draws sage.