Profanity Illustration

Profanity

Frequently Asked Questions

Contents

Is Profanity really the best XMPP client out there?

Rest assured, it is the best. Rigorous, completely unbiased tests conducted in an isolated tmux session by our developers concluded with 100% statistical certainty that Profanity is unmatched. You can’t argue with science.

How do I connect with multiple accounts?

Profanity only supports one account per instance. But you certainly can run several instances of Profanity! Run Profanity in multiple terminals or use a terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux. An example setup can be seen in this blogpost.

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Can Profanity use my keychain/keyring to retrieve my password?

Yes, the /account command includes an eval_password property which can be used to execute a script to retrieve your password.

For example on Ubuntu using gnome-keyring and secret-tool:

To add the password:

secret-tool store --label="Bobs account" xmpp bob@server.org

You will be prompted to enter the password.

Command to use for the account eval_password property:

secret-tool lookup xmpp bob@server.org

On OS X, use the following command for the eval_password property:

security find-generic-password -s bob@server.org -w

You can also use Profanity together with pass, see this guide

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Why are my settings not persistent?

Because you did not use /save.

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Where is the profrc file format described?

It is recommended to use the commands inside Profanity to manipulate the profrc file. This way we can be sure you don’t end up with unsupported values. If you really want to edit it we have a documented version in our repo.

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Why can I not type anything in the input bar?

Profanity uses the ncursesw library to support wide characters, which requires a UTF-8 encoding. Try running the following (or the equivalent for your language’s UTF-8 encoding) in the terminal before running profanity.

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
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How can I hide join/leave messages in MUCs?

You can deactivate those messages with the following command:

/presence chat none
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I’d like to contribute, what should I do?

A page has been written with some ideas for how to help out. Any contributions/ideas are very welcome. Also see the CONTRIBUTING.md file on GitHub.

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I’d like to donate to Profanity

If you want to pay the developers and maintainers of Profanity a coffee there are various ways to do so.

On GitHub there is a Sponsor button linking to relevant pages. If you want to send the money directly you can ask for an IBAN via email.

We also got selected for GitHub Sponsors. You can find the link also on the Sponsor button on GitHub.

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How to connect to XMPP server using Tor

To connect to the XMPP server by the Tor network, you must launch Profanity with a tool called “proxychains-ng”.

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How to connect to an onion XMPP server

An onion XMPP server is a server which is providing an onion address to reach it inside the Tor network. You can specify the onion address with the /account command in Profanity.

/account set account_name server address.onion
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How to run the latest version on old distributions?

Some distributions, like Debian, have backports repositories. You can also run Profanity in a container via distrobox. See our blogpost.

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How do I automatically open chat windows with contacts?

To the right side you can see your roster. It contains all your contacts and rooms (MUCs). MUCs can be automatically joined via bookmarks. If you want to open a chat window to a user automatically upon the start of profanity you can write a plugin to do that. Or you can call profanity with --cmd.

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