Telegram-purple is a Libpurple plugin that adds support for the Telegram messenger. Its still in an early (pre-alpha) development stage, but already provides basic chat functionality and group chats.
This plugin is based on [Telegram-cli](http://github.com/vysheng/tg), a full-featured terminal-based client for Telegram created by [Vysheng](http://github.com/vysheng).
Warning, this version is mainly for development and testing and NOT for productive use.Even though it already provides basic features, you should still expect bugs and crashes when running it.
When encountering a crash or some other bugs, please report it to us, preferably together with a backtrace of the crashed application [https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GetABacktrace]
Currently we can only provide an installation guide for Linux, even though it should be possible to compile this plugin on other platforms. If someone manages to create a working Windows, BSD or OSX build, please let us know.
NOTE: Ubuntu is currently not working, since libpurple doesn't seem to find libssl when loading the plugin. It will compile, but Pidgin won't be able to load it.
After succesfully completing all steps mentioned in the installation instructions, you should restart Pidgin to ensure that the plugin is loaded. When everything went well, Telegram should show up in the account manager:
The username is your current phone number, including your full country prefix instead of a leading '0'. For Germany, this would be '+49' for example. Telegram will verify your phone number by sending you a verification code via sms. You will be prompted for this code, once that happens.
The Telegram phone applications for iOS and Android make use of standardized Unicode smileys (called [Emojis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)). Pidgin
does not display those smileys natively, but you can install a custom smiley theme like [https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji] or [https://github.com/VxJasonxV/emoji-for-pidgin] and activate it under Settings > Themes > Smiley Theme.