extCLI

A plugin for exteraGram that turns your client into a TUI/CLI environment: a real shell, control over plugins and client settings, tooling for plugin authors, and a mode that renders the whole client as text.

Status: early development.

What works

• A console, opened from the side menu, a chat's overflow menu, or by typing .cli in any chat.
• A POSIX-style shell: pipes, redirection including here-documents, &&/||, variables and ${...} forms, $(...), arithmetic, globbing, if, for, while/until, case, functions, aliases and source.
• Real programs through /system/bin/sh and the toybox applets, with a Python-implemented fallback set (ls, cat, grep, head, …) for devices where the system shell is unavailable.
• Client commands: plugin (list/info/enable/disable/reload/path/config), host (status/paths/doctor/version/class), log.
• Colors taken from your Telegram theme, plus an Amoled theme.

Requirements

Client	exteraGram 12.9.0 or newer
Plugin SDK	1.4.5.1 or newer
Android	7.0+ (API 24)

Building

Install ElyxBuilder:

pip install ElyxBuilder

From the repository root:

elyb build -v -nf          # uncompiled
elyb build -c 2 -v -nf     # compiled to bytecode (Python 3.11)

The archive is written to builds/.

Kotlin renderer

The character-grid renderer is Kotlin, shipped prebuilt as extcli/dex/terminal.dex, so an ordinary plugin build needs no Java toolchain. Rebuild it only when kotlin/ changes:

./scripts/kotlin-build.sh

The script looks for its toolchain in $EXTCLI_TOOLCHAIN (default /opt/extcli-toolchain), or in a local Android SDK:

Tool	Where to get it
kotlinc	Kotlin releases → unpack as kotlinc/
r8.jar (provides d8)	Google Maven
android-all.jar	Maven Central

Tests

The shell, the output formatting layer and the TUI composer never import Android APIs, so they run off device:

python3 -m pytest tests/

Notes on the runtime

exteraGram targets SDK 36, so SELinux forbids executing files from the app's data directory. extCLI therefore does not assume a bundled proot can run: it probes the device at startup and picks a backend from what is actually allowed — /system/bin/sh in a pty, in-process Python builtins, the dynamic linker, or a Termux bridge. Run Diagnostics on the plugin's settings page to see the result for your device.

License

Apache-2.0