Can someone shed some light on the landscape here? I thought there were only 2 possible ways to use Signal; the mobile apps and the desktop. Is this CLI app somehow talking to them? If anyone can make a client, then what's stopping someone from building better mobile apps and indeed a web client!? Other than of course the sheer effort that's involved obviously.

This uses signal-cli[0] (communication happens over D-Bus) and signal-cli in turn uses a patched version of libsignal-service-java[1]. The latter might be used in some of the clients provided by Signal (not sure) but the signal-cli + libsignal-service-java combo talks to Signal servers instead of any apps running locally.

Nothing is stopping you from building a web client for yourself.

[0]: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-service-java

That's what I was thinking too but then last commit was 7 months ago. Not sure if any of the latest features would have required new code in libsignal-service-java though.

The CLI is Java and probably not well documented.

In the past I think Open Whisper systems have been hostile to third party client builds interacting with their servers, so I'm not sure they'd welcome third party client implementations.

I mean, as soon as third-party clients were a thing, the Play and App stores would be immediately clogged up with Signal clones left right and centre, all of which steal your data and then ??? it.

You don't need most of the lines drawn in this TUI. You should use slight differences in background color instead.

Lines can be useful for separation, but in this case you should always favor horizontal over vertical lines.

I dislike modern "flat" user interfaces which try to remove boxes and lines as much as possible. It makes it harder to get oriented in an app, discern hierarchy, and tell different regions apart. (Maybe reducing boxes saves space, as long as you don't replace them with large regions of whitespace.)

I'm glad that https://raw.githubusercontent.com/derricw/siggo/master/media... has boxes and line separators, and hope they don't get removed.

Hello! I am the creator of this project.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd love to make the look of the GUI more configurable in the future. As of right now, the only things that are configurable are:

* panel labels

* contact colors

I'm using https://github.com/rivo/tview for the UI, and am using (largely) default options for most widgets.

Too bad Signal API does not bring unencrypted messages. I was also surprised to discover that when you link new devices, you lose history. In general, I ruined a month of text message history, which got into Signal with not way to bring it back (I am referring to the unencrypted text messages).

I am pertty sure signal backs up SMS messages and if you enable backups, it looks like you might be able to extract them with this: https://github.com/xeals/signal-back/blob/master/README.md

Not great for the non tech-savvy, but I don’t know of any SMS backup strategy that is

Nice, looking forward to trying this. The Electron-based Mac client uses way too much RAM for what it does.

Unfortunately I don't have MacOS building yet https://github.com/derricw/siggo/issues/6 but hopefully soon.

Really nice work, I'll be using this a lot.

Thank you for this!