Caprine – An Unofficial Elegant Facebook Messenger Desktop App

There is no doubt Facebook is one of the most popular and dynamic social network platform in the modern Internet era. It has revolutionized technology, social networking, and the future of how we live and interact. With Facebook, We can connect, communicate with one another, instantly share our memories, photos, files and even money to anyone, anywhere in the world. Even though Facebook has its own official messenger, some tech enthusiasts and developers have developed a few alternative and feature-rich apps to communicate with your buddies. The one we are going to discuss today is Caprine. It is a free, elegant, open source, and unofficial Facebook messenger desktop app built with Electron framework.

Caprine Features

Caprine comes with many useful features that you can't find in the official messenger app. Some of notable features are;

• Privacy focused. You can hide your last seen and typing indicators.
• Responsive. The interface adapts when resized to a small size.
• Desktop notifications.
• Dark mode.
• Jump between conversations using hotkeys.
• Copy/paste image support. It also can prevent the accidental copy-pastes.
• Prevents link tracking. That means the links that you click on will not be tracked by Facebook.
• Automatically updates when a new version available.
• Cross platform. Supports Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
• Free, open source.
• And many.

Install Caprine in Linux

For Arch-based systems, it is available in official repositories. If you're on Arch Linux, just run the following command to install it:

$ sudo pacman -S caprine

On other Linux distributions, you can download the latest Caprine binaries from the releases page. The installation file is available as .deb, snap package, and .AppImage.

The .deb file can be installed using dpkg package manager on any Debian-based systems.

$ wget https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine/releases/download/v2.22.1/caprine_2.22.1_amd64.deb

$ sudo dpkg -i caprine_2.22.1_amd64.deb

$ sudo apt-get install -f

The snap package can be installed using command:

$ sudo snap install caprine

If you downloaded .AppImage file, you need to make it as executable before running it.

$ chmod +x caprine-2.22.1-x86_64.AppImage

How to use Caprine Facebook Messenger Desktop App

If you have installed Caprine using snap or pacman package managers, launch it from your application launcher. If you have downloaded .AppImage, go the location where you have downloaded it and launch it as show below.

$ ./caprine-2.22.1-x86_64.AppImage

At first launch, Caprine will prompt whether you like to integrate caprine-x.x.x-xxx_xx.AppImage with your system or not. If you choose Yes, Caprine launcher will be added to your applications menu and install icons. If you don't do this you can still launch the application by double-clicking on the AppImage.

Once you launched it, you will see the login page. Enter your Facebook username and password and click Continue:

You're all set now. Start chatting with your contacts.

Caprine messenger

The interface is exactly same as the official app, so you won't find any difficulties when using it, even if it is the first time. Just use it as the way you use the official messenger or web app. When closing the window, the app will continue running in the background and you will see it in your tray bar on Linux/Windows. Right-click the tray icon and choose Quit to completely quit the app.

Caprine has all features that you use in the official facebook app. You can attach files, send stickers, emojis, gifs, voice clips, take photos directly from the cam, send likes and a lot more.

Also, you can react (smile, laugh, angry, thumbs up/down etc) to a particular message or an image. To do so, just click on the three dots next to the message or the image, click React button in the pop up window and choose the reaction from the list.

Dark mode

You can switch to dark mode by pressing CTRL+d or click Menu -> View -> Dark Mode. To go back to the normal mode, press CTRL+d again.

Hide last seen and typing indicators

You can choose to prevent people from knowing when you've seen a message or are currently typing. Both options are available in File -> Caprine Settings menu.

Caprine settings

Switch between conversations

To switch from one conversation to another, use CTRL+{1...9}. For example, to switch to the 2nd conversation, press CTRL+2. To switch to 5th conversation, press CTRL+5 and so on. To go back to the previous conversation, press CTRL+SHIFT+tab and to go to the next conversation, press CTRL+tab.

Desktop notifications

You will get the desktop notifications in the tray icon after closing the chat window.

You can turn it off/on from the Preferences window. To go to Preferences, press, CTRL+, or Menu -> Edit -> Preferences.

Do not forget to click Done to apply the changes made in the Settings window.

Increase/Decrease Text Size

To increase the text size, press CTRL+SHIFT+=. To decrease the text size, press CTRL+-. To reset the text size to default value, press CTRL+0. Also, you can change the text size from Menu -> View.

Keyboard shortcuts

Resources:

• Caprine website
• Caprine GitHub Repository