scli is a simple terminal user interface for Signal. It uses signal-cli and urwid.

• Firstly, you need to install signal-cli. Follow the guide provided in the README.
• Install libunixsocket-java from your package manager if you have not installed it yet. (Arch Linux users should install libmatthew-unix-java from AUR. If you installed signal-cli from AUR, you can skip this step.)
• Install urwid. You can install it trough your distributions package manager (search for python3-urwid or python-urwid) or you can use pip to install: pip3 install urwid.

scli does not provide anything for registering/linking, you need to do this using signal-cli.

For linking your computer follow these steps (for registering a new number, see README of signal-cli)

• Run signal-cli link.
• This will output tsdevice:/... URI. Copy that and create a QR code with it using qrencode (or any other QR code generator of your choice):

qrencode 'LINK' -o qrcode.png

• Open Signal application on your phone and scan the QR code you just generated.
• Run signal-cli -u PHONE_NUMBER receive. This is required to fetch your contacts for the first time.
• Now you can start using:

scli -u PHONE_NUMBER

Note: PHONE_NUMBER starts with + followed by the country code.

A simple two-paned interface is provided. Left pane contains the contact list and the right pane contains the conversation. You can switch focus between panes by hitting Tab (or Shift + Tab). Hitting tab for the first time focuses the conversation, hitting it again focuses to input line. So the tab order is Contacts -> Conversation -> Input, you can use Shift + Tab for cycling backwards.

• Use j/k to go down/up in contacts list or in messages.
• Hitting enter on a contact starts conversation and focuses to input line.
• Hitting l on a contact only starts conversation.
• Hitting o on a message opens the URL if there is one, if not it opens the attachment if there is one. (needs xdg-open)
• Hitting enter on a message opens the attachment if there is one, if not it opens the URL if there is one. (needs xdg-open)
• Hitting y on a message puts it into system clipboard. (needs xclip)
• g focuses first contact/message.
• G focuses last contact/message.

There are some basic commands that you can use. Hit : to enter command mode (or simply focus the input line and type :).

• :quit or :q simply quits the program.
• :openUrl or :u opens last URL in messages, if there is one.
• :openAttach or :o opens last attachment in messages, if there is one.
• :attach FILE_PATH or :a FILE_PATH attaches given file to message.
• :attachClip or :c attaches clipboard content to message. This command tries to detect clipboard content. If clipboard contains something with the mime-type image/png or image/jpg, simply attaches the image to message. If clipboard contains text/uri-list it attaches all the files in that URI list to your message. This command needs xclip installed.
• :toggleNotifications or :n toggles desktop notifications. If desktop notifications are enabled, when a new message arrives a notification will be sent trough notify-send. Notifications are disabled at program startup, you can toggle it with :n.

Examples:

:attach ~/cute_dog.png check out this cute dog!
:attachclip here is another picture.

Note: Commands are case insensitive, :quit and :qUiT does the same thing.

There are some simple configuration options. You can either pass them as command-line arguments or add them to your configuration file. Run scli --help to see options. Configuration file syntax is also pretty easy. Lines starting with # and empty lines are ignored, other lines should consist key=value pairs.

scli -u +1234567890 --enable-notifications=true

Configuration file equivalent of this command is:

# Long option forms are used in config file. (u=+123... is not valid.)
username=+1234567890
enable-notifications=true