GitHub - KnutMann/adium: Adium is an open source and free instant messaging application for macOS that can connect to XMPP (Jabber), IRC and more.

Adium (revival fork)

This is a fork of the original Adium (source) that revives and modernizes it for current macOS. It began as an Apple Silicon (arm64) port, as the original is an Intel-only binary from 2021. Since then much has changed: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Microsoft Teams arrived next to the classic services that stood the test of time, encrypted voice and video calls over XMPP, full Dark Mode, replies straight from Notification Center banners, a rebuilt System Settings-style preferences window, a WKWebView message view, and a long list of fixes for how modern macOS behaves.

Adium was created and developed by the Adium team. All credit for the application itself belongs to the original developers; see Copyright.txt. This fork is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. It is maintained by a long-time Adium user who simply wants to keep a beloved app alive after many years of use. The upstream project has been inactive since 2021.

Current version: 1.8.0.

Original project

• Website: https://adium.im
• Source: https://github.com/adium/adium
• Last official release (Intel; on Apple Silicon it runs only through Rosetta 2, which Apple is phasing out): Adium 1.5.10.4

What this fork changes

Messaging and services

• WhatsApp (via purple-gowhatsapp): QR-code device linking, inline images and voice notes, reactions, typing, read markers, group chats with member lists, profile pictures, business account names, an optional channel filter, and address-book names
• Telegram (via the bundled tdlib-purple plugin) with the same everyday features, plus address-book integration
• Signal (via purple-presage), linked to your phone as an official companion device
• Microsoft Teams (via purple-teams), both work and personal accounts
• IRC modernized: the built-in IRC protocol is replaced by purple2-ircv3, which speaks the same protocol plus typing notifications and other IRCv3 capabilities
• XMPP brought forward: message carbons (XEP-0280), so a conversation continued on another device shows up here too; client state indication (XEP-0352), telling the server when Adium is in the background; room bookmarks synchronized with other clients (XEP-0402), including autojoin; delivery receipts (XEP-0184) and read markers (XEP-0333), the latter now requested on outgoing messages too, so a message you send can be confirmed delivered and then read; message reactions (XEP-0444), sent from the message's context menu and delivered to the exact message they name, in direct chats and rooms alike; pictures shared by modern clients through HTTP upload (XEP-0363, announced per XEP-0066) are shown in the conversation itself rather than as a bare link, governed by the same setting that controls automatic file transfers, including its restriction to contacts of your own list; and a picture you send goes the same way when the server offers it, uploaded per XEP-0363 and messaged as its address, with the classic file transfer as the fallback
• Bonjour is back: chatting with the people on the same network, with no server.
• Voice messages: a recorder on a shelf below the conversation, opened from the toolbar or from a button beside the message field. Record, pause, listen to it, then send it with the arrow; it goes out the way other clients expect it, so they play it rather than offer a download
• OTR migrated to the libotr 4.x API, and OMEMO (XEP-0384) added beside it, which is what other XMPP clients encrypt with today
• Removed services whose networks no longer exist: AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, MobileMe, LiveJournal, Sametime, Twitter, Zephyr and Meanwhile

Still supported classic services: XMPP/Jabber, Bonjour, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise and SIMPLE, plus OTR and OMEMO encryption and tabbed chats in a modern look.

End to end encryption over XMPP

Conversations, Gajim, Dino and Monal encrypt with OMEMO, most of them by default, and until now a message from any of them arrived as the apology its sender attached for clients that cannot read one. Adium reads them now, and writes them.

• Encrypted one to one conversations (XEP-0384, the widely spoken namespace rather than the newer one)
• A padlock that closes only when the message really is encrypted, not when it has merely been asked for
• Every device the other person has, shown in the encryption menu with its fingerprint, each one to be accepted or turned down; ours is at the top to be read out
• Rather fail than fall back: a message that cannot be encrypted waits, and then says so, instead of going out in the clear
• Says what it used so a client that cannot read the message can explain why (XEP-0380)
• Pictures and voice notes are encrypted too (XEP-0454): what goes up to the file server is bytes nobody there can read, and what arrives is played or shown rather than left as an address

Group chats are not encrypted yet.

Voice and video calls over XMPP

Adium can place and take calls again, encrypted the way modern clients insist on. The signalling is Adium's own, written against the XEPs; the media runs through Google's WebRTC natively.

• Ringing before answering (XEP-0353)
• Encrypted end to end with DTLS-SRTP (XEP-0320)
• Finding a way through and agreeing what to send, which is most of what a call does before anyone hears anything (XEP-0166, XEP-0167, XEP-0176, XEP-0293, XEP-0294, XEP-0338, XEP-0339)
• STUN and TURN from the account's own host (XEP-0215)
• Microphone and camera can be switched off mid-call (XEP-0167's mute and unmute)
• Center Stage support Camera follows person, where possible
• Check Call Readiness… Check whether Adium can make or receive calls

Dark Mode and interface

• Full Dark Mode: the application chrome follows the system appearance, or a light/dark choice of its own
• A rebuilt preferences window in the style of System Settings: a source-list sidebar, cards instead of boxed groups, and a reusable settings form every pane is laid out on
• Installed xtras are managed in that window rather than in a window of their own, one card per category, and every row opens a page about that xtra: its icon, what it says it is, and the fields its manifest fills in
• The chat message view renders with WKWebView; the last legacy WebView is gone (libpurple's protocol forms are native Cocoa now)
• Two bundled monochrome service icon sets in the plain style of macOS's own symbols, one for light and one for dark
• Tab tear-off works again: drag a chat out into its own window, or back into another, with a live preview while dragging
• A bit of nostalgia: the now-playing music status supports Apple Music, Spotify and Swinsian
• Modern window chrome, tab-bar vibrancy, and a sweep of fixes for focus rings, scrolling, contact-list drawing and tooltips on recent macOS

JavaScript plugins for the message view

• A new xtra type: an .AdiumPlugin bundle carrying one JavaScript file that changes how messages are displayed. It works in every message style, needs no compiled code, and therefore never worries about processor architectures
• Five such plugins come bundled: Read Receipts draws the familiar ticks next to the timestamp as a sent message advances (one grey tick when the server has it, a grey pair once delivered, a blue pair once read); Reaction Chips gathers emoji reactions as small chips on the message they belong to; Big Emoji enlarges short emoji-only messages; Markdown Light renders the usual asterisk and tilde markers as bold, italic and strikethrough; Code Blocks sets backticked spans and fenced blocks in monospace
• Built security first: every plugin runs in its own isolated script world, the message window refuses all remote network loads, and a plugin only ever sees the rendered display, never the text you send, your logs, or the network
• XtrasCreator authors the new type, with a scaffold to start from, an editor, and a lint pass that catches the common mistakes

Notifications

• Notifications go through the macOS Notification Center, replacing Growl
• Reply straight from the banner: message notifications carry a text field, and the answer is sent without ever bringing Adium forward

Platform and security

• Native arm64 build; the app bundle is self-contained, with no Homebrew or other third-party runtime dependency
• All bundled libraries are native arm64, built from pinned sources
• Bundled libpurple upgraded from 2.12.0 (2017) to 2.14.14, on a current glib
• Server certificates are actually verified (SecTrust with a proper trust prompt) on every SSL connection, including IRC, where the old code silently accepted anything
• Passwords stored through the Keychain (SecItem) API
• Address book integration moved from the AddressBook framework (deprecated since 2015) to the Contacts framework, with the modern permission prompt; cards are matched by phone number, chat address or a manual link

Localization

• String extraction caught up: hundreds of strings the app already showed but had never been extracted are now translatable, filled in across the 26 shipped languages

Tools

• XtrasCreator, the companion app for making Adium xtras, rebuilt from scratch on a modern base (Other/XtrasCreator): it authors emoticon sets, sound sets, status/service/menu-bar/group-chat icon packs, dock icons, message styles, contact list themes and layouts, and script packs, and writes the description Adium shows on an xtra's page
• Contact Pictures, opened from the Address Book settings: the cards linked to your chat contacts, each with the chat picture and the card picture side by side, and one button that puts the chat picture on the card. This is the single write Adium ever makes to the address book, and it happens only when that button is pressed

Adopted from the unreleased 1.6/1.7 line

Adium's development did not stop at the last state of adium/adium: the Mercurial mainline and community branches continued toward an Adium 1.6/1.7 that was never released, preserved today in forks such as shtrom/adium.

• The emoticon picker in the message entry field, which replaces the old emoticon toolbar item. Two more buttons can stand beside it, one that records a voice note and one that opens the formula editor; the Messages settings switch each of the three on or off, and only the emoticon button starts out on
• Room configuration window for owners of XMPP chat rooms
• OTR messages routed to the contact's most recently active device instead of the best-ranked one
• Transcripts split at midnight, so a chat left open for days shows up on every day it covers

This is a work in progress; expect rough edges.

System requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 12 or later
• Everything is native arm64, including all bundled dependencies (libpurple, glib, libotr, ...): no Homebrew required to run
• Xcode for building (there are no binary releases at this time)

For Intel Macs and older systems, use the original Adium 1.5.10.4.

Building

One command from a fresh checkout to an installed application:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/KnutMann/adium.git
cd adium
./install.sh

Everything beyond Xcode is checked into the repository as prebuilt arm64 binaries. The script verifies the bundled protocol plug-ins (including a functional probe that asks libpurple itself whether every plug-in's protocol registers - the failure mode it guards against is silent), builds the app, verifies the result and installs it to /Applications. The same verification runs as a phase of every Xcode build.

The app lands in build/Release/Adium.app first (signed with a local certificate if there is one and ad hoc otherwise, so it runs on the machine that built it; handing binaries to others would need a proper signing identity). --build-only stops there and installs nothing, --install installs without asking, and given neither it asks, unless there is no terminal to ask at, in which case it installs nothing. --debug builds the Debug configuration, and --rebuild-dependencies builds the bundled libraries from source first, which is otherwise never needed. ./install.sh --help lists them all.

./bootstrap.sh is the same script with --build-only, kept under its old name.

The XtrasCreator companion app (see Tools above) builds separately: xcodebuild -project Other/XtrasCreator/XtrasCreator.xcodeproj build.

Three things are fetched rather than vendored, and install.sh gets them by running Dependencies/fetch.sh before it builds anything. It is idempotent and takes about a second once everything is in place, so there is no reason to skip it. Building from Xcode alone does not run it, so run it once after cloning:

• the MMTabBarView submodule, which git clones only when asked a second time (git submodule update --init --recursive)
• Google's WebRTC, which carries the media of a call: the official Chromium build repackaged by stasel/WebRTC (version 153.0.0, BSD 3-Clause), checked against a pinned SHA-256 and kept out of the repository because it is a 200 MB binary framework
• picomemo, the cryptographic half of OMEMO (ISC), fetched and built from source at a pinned commit

Without them the build fails at a compiler error naming a header, which says nothing about a download being what was missing.

Everything else Adium links against is a prebuilt arm64 binary in the repository: the frameworks and libraries under Frameworks/ and the protocol plug-ins under PurplePlugins/. A plain clone plus Xcode is therefore enough to build, and nothing here needs a Homebrew toolchain.

Building those libraries from source instead is a developer's job, not a build step, and there is one switch for it:

./install.sh --rebuild-dependencies

which runs Dependencies/build.sh twice, once for libpurple and glib and everything the bundle loads beside them and once for libotr, then Dependencies/copy_frameworks.sh, and Dependencies/opus/build-opus.sh for the codec. Every source is fetched from a pinned address and checked against a recorded SHA-256 before anything unpacks it, and the binaries under Frameworks/ are overwritten in place.

It needs autoconf, automake, libtool, pkg-config, meson, cmake and ninja on the path, which is what the Homebrew toolchain is for here, and it takes the better part of an hour. Sources fetched before the checksums existed carry no sum beside them, so the first run after updating to a revision that has them fetches all sixteen again.

License

The source in this repository is GNU GPL v2 or later, see License.txt. Original code copyright the Adium team and contributors (Copyright.txt).

The application you build from it is not GPL v2, and it is worth being plain about why. Several of the bundled plug-ins carry stronger terms, and since every source file here says "or later", combining them is permitted; what it costs is the GPL v2 option for the finished binary, not the licence of the sources.

• libsignal-presage.so is GPL v3 itself, and the Rust it links in statically (presage, presage-store-sqlite and libsignal-service-rs) declares AGPL-3.0-only in its own Cargo.toml. The Affero terms therefore reach the shipped binary.
• libwhatsmeow.so, libteams.so and libteams-personal.so are GPL v3.
• libtelegram-tdlib.so links the bundled OpenSSL 3, whose Apache 2.0 terms do not combine with GPL v2 at all. The same OpenSSL is now used by AdiumLibpurple itself, for the cryptography behind OMEMO, so this one is no longer confined to a plug-in.

The texts those terms require to travel with the work are in Licenses/: GPL-3.0.txt and AGPL-3.0.txt.

Leaving out the plug-ins, which the scripts allow, drops the GPL v3 and AGPL terms but not the OpenSSL one, so such a build is GPL v3 or later rather than v2. The sources themselves stay GPL v2 or later, and it is only the combination that moves.

Bundled third-party binaries and their sources

This repository ships some components as prebuilt arm64 binaries. The corresponding sources are publicly available at the exact revisions listed here (the Dependencies/patches/ directories document every local change on top of them):

Of the three Xiph libraries, only the first two are linked into the application; opusfile is the reader Testing/voice/opus-test.sh checks the encoder against, and ships so that the check runs from a clone.

The LGPL components are dynamically linked, so they can be swapped out by rebuilding the bundle. The two Xiph libraries are the exception: they are linked statically, because a codec used by one source file is not worth a framework to embed and sign, and their licence does not ask for it.

Adding a library

Anything the build reads out of Frameworks/ has to get there by a script in Dependencies/, and both have to be in place before the change is pushed. Deciding how a new library is carried, vendored as a binary or fetched at build time, is part of introducing it, not something to leave until somebody else cannot build.

The test is one line: every path under Frameworks/ or Dependencies/build named in Frameworks/AIUtilities/xcconfigs/*.xcconfig must be produced by a script under Dependencies/, and must be listed in the table above or among the three fetched things. Opus was introduced without either and went unnoticed for weeks, because it had been built by hand on the one machine that mattered.