How to use both Whatsapp and Telegram?

[HaoZeke]

Hi! Sorry if this is trivial. Is the best way to use multiple protocols to run two instances with different conf directories? Or is there a single client multiple messaging backend option of sorts?

P.S. Fantastic project by the way! It's a lifesaver on Wayland distros

[d99kris]

Hi @HaoZeke - that is a good question.

Short answer:
Yes, the best way is to run two instances with different conf dirs.

Long answer:
So when nchat v2 was developed the code was designed to cater for multiple protocols in a single session, but the functionality was never really tested out (the whatsapp library at the time was quite unstable). So the multi-protocol functionality ended up disabled by default and I haven't tested it myself after I released v2 back in 2021 . You can try it out by building nchat with something like:

mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake -DHAS_MULTIPROTOCOL=ON .. && make -s && sudo make install

Then you'd need to set up one protocol at a time, i.e. running nchat -s one time for whatsapp and one time for telegram. But it's not officially supported at this point, so any bugs found may or may not get fixed.

[HaoZeke]

Thanks, that makes sense, will stick with config folders unless I have time to also contribute for now :)

[d99kris]

Hi again @HaoZeke - I finally got around to take a look at this. Support for multiple protocols was added now, see #140.

[HaoZeke]

Awesome! Will try it out ASAP.

[Maverick990]

Initially, when developing nchat v2, the code was designed to accommodate multiple protocols within a single session. However, due to the instability of the WhatsApp library at that time, the multi-protocol functionality was disabled by default.

[d99kris]

I'm not sure what the purpose is with posting this answer? Isn't this simply a rehash of my answer above?

[HaoZeke]

Closing the discussion to prevent possible spam :)