Paper Plane

Chat over Telegram on a modern and elegant client

Paper Plane is an alternative Telegram client. It uses libadwaita for its user interface and strives to meet the design principles of the GNOME desktop.

Note

This is a maintained continuation of paper-plane-developers/paper-plane, which has not been developed since June 2024. See Why this fork.

Paper Plane is still under development and not yet feature-complete. However, the following things are already working:

• The use of multiple accounts at the same time.
• Viewing text messages, images, stickers and files.
• Sending text messages and images.
• Replying to messages.
• Searching for groups and persons.

Installation Instructions

Paper Plane is an in-development project and it isn't considered stable software yet.

Also, the included API credentials in the Flathub release are still very new and untested. In some cases, your account may end up banned by Telegram (check the Telegram API Credentials section below).

You can avoid that by using a custom built version of Paper Plane with provided API credentials via meson options, like this AUR package which you may prefer using if you use Arch Linux. These API credentials are much older and thus the risk of getting banned is reduced.

Flathub Beta

But, if you still feel brave enough, you can install the latest release from Flathub Beta. To do this, you need to add the the Flathub Beta remote first

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Then you can install the application by issuing

$ flatpak install flathub-beta app.drey.PaperPlane

Paper Plane can be kept up to date by issuing flatpak's update command like

$ flatpak update

CI Build (Not Recommended)

You can also grab the latest CI build with test API credentials from here. Then you need to unzip the archive's content and install the application with the command flatpak install paper-plane.flatpak. Keep in mind that these test credentials are even more riskier than those from the Flathub release. Also, you need to manually keep it updated.

Telegram API Credentials

Telegram requires custom clients to set some credentials for using their API. Paper Plane doesn't provide official API credentials, so the packagers are expected to set their own credentials for distributing the app, obtainable at https://my.telegram.org/. However, Paper Plane includes the Telegram's test credentials by default, which are very limited, but usable (especially for development). However, it's known that Telegram sometimes decides to ban accounts that use such credentials (especially newer accounts). For that reason, it's suggested to use your own API credentials, which can be set by using meson options (see the Build Instructions section below).

Build Instructions

Gnome Builder

Using Gnome Builder is the easiest way to get the app built without even using the terminal: just clone the repository and press the big "Run" button at the top and it will automatically build all the required dependencies together with the app.

Meson

Prerequisites

The following packages are required to build Paper Plane:

• meson
• cargo
• blueprint-compiler
• GTK >= 4.12
• libadwaita >= 1.4
• libshumate >= 1.0.0
• rlottie >= 0.2
• TDLib 1.8.65 (the TL schema of every supported TDLib version is kept in tdlib-rs/tl/api_<version>.tl)
• Telegram API Credentials (optional, but recommended)

Additionally, Paper Plane requires the following GStreamer plugins installed in your system to correctly show all media files:

• gstreamer-libav
• gstreamer-plugins-good

Instructions

meson . _build -Dtg_api_id=ID -Dtg_api_hash=HASH
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Why this fork

The original repository has had no commits since June 2024, and its pull requests are left unreviewed. When we asked in issue #575 "project status" whether someone could be assigned to approve pull requests, the answer was that reviewing takes real effort and "if you really want that, you can make a fork". So we did, and we maintain it: the main branch of this repository contains

• the upstream main branch, including everything merged after v0.1.0-beta.5 (runtime configurable API credentials, marking messages as read, telling TDLib about opened and closed chats, dependency updates);
• every upstream pull request that could be merged: #467 (replies chat), #572 (doap syntax), #618 (translations), #624 (README dependencies), #625 (secret chat style), #631 (old GL renderer in the Flatpak), #644 (gtk-rs 0.9 and libadwaita-rs 0.7);
• a port to tdlib-rs and the current TDLib: it builds against TDLib 1.8.65, and the API is generated from the TL schema of the system TDLib;
• fixes found while testing: clean shutdown of the TDLib clients, separate sessions for the test data centers, no panics on unsupported authorization states, and a chat history that works with a stock GTK.

Pull requests that are drafts or need a rebase before they can be merged (#508/#591, #523/#470 and others) are tracked, and new pull requests to the original repository are reviewed and merged here.

Another fork was announced in issue #646 (Sk7Str1p3/PaperPlane); its main branch has no changes besides a Nix development shell. The fork is maintained by the ALT Linux packager of Paper Plane.

Contribution

Any type of participation is encouraged. If you want to translate, you can refer to our weblate project. But also design and art contributions are welcome. For this our design repository is the first place to go.

If you want to contribute code, please keep your commits in the style of conventional commits. The only difference we make is that we capitalize the actual description after the colon ":" at the beginning of the sentence.

Acknowledgment

The general code architecture was heavily inspired by Fractal.

Also, some logic is inspired by Telegram X, which helps to understand how to use some TDLib features correctly and to their fullest potential.