| name | tg |
| description | Send a Telegram message (and optional attachments) via the `tg` CLI to one of two preconfigured destinations: **personal** (personal channel, `TELEGRAM_TOKEN_PERSONAL` + `TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID_PERSONAL`) or **automation** (automation channel, `TELEGRAM_TOKEN_AUTOMATION` + `TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID_AUTOMATION`). Use this skill whenever the user wants to push a Telegram message, send themselves a notification, ping a channel, or forward content to Telegram — even if they don't say "telegram" explicitly. Triggers on `/tg`, and conversationally on phrasings like "send this to personal", "send to automation", "ping personal with ...", "ping automation", "notif automation: ...", "notify personal that ...", "forward this to automation", "send to personal", or any sentence whose intent is to deliver content to a destination named personal or automation. Defaults to **automation** when no destination is given. Always shows a confirmation preview unless `--yes` / `-y` is passed.
|
| user_invocable | true |
| argument-hint | [personal|automation] <message> [--attach <path>] [--format markdown|html] [--yes] |
tg
Sends content to one of two Telegram bots via the tg CLI (a thin wrapper around
telegram-owl, packaged via nix at ~/nix/pkgs/tg/).
Why two bots
- personal → personal voice. Used for messages the user writes to themselves or close circle.
- automation → automation voice. Used for task completions, alerts, scripted notifications.
The destination is the only thing that picks the persona. Everything else is identical.
Destinations and aliases
| Canonical | Accepted aliases (case-insensitive) | Token env | Chat env |
|---|
personal | personal, p | TELEGRAM_TOKEN_PERSONAL | TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID_PERSONAL |
automation | automation, a | TELEGRAM_TOKEN_AUTOMATION | TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID_AUTOMATION |
Default if no destination is specified: automation.
Argument parsing
Input arrives as a free-form argument string (slash) or natural language (conversational).
Extract:
- dest: first whitespace-delimited token if it matches an alias above. Otherwise no
dest was provided — use
automation and treat the whole input as body.
- flags (parsed and forwarded to
tg):
--attach <path> — file attachment (repeatable; path may be quoted)--from-file <path> — read body from a file (overrides any inline body)--format markdown / --format html — message format--silent, --spoiler, --protect, --no-link-preview, --as-document — passthrough
- body: whatever remains. Strip surrounding quotes if present. Preserve newlines.
For conversational input, infer the same fields. Examples:
- "send this to personal: The report is ready" → dest=personal, body="The report is ready"
- "ping automation with /tmp/log.txt — build done" → dest=automation, attach=[/tmp/log.txt], body="build done"
- "notify automation that the deployment is OK" → dest=automation, body="the deployment is OK"
Workflow
1. Preview and confirm in chat
Always show the user a preview first and wait for explicit confirmation, unless the user
already passed --yes / -y:
→ Destination : personal
Format : markdown
Attachments : /tmp/report.pdf
Message :
---
**Important** : call your sister
---
Send? (y/n)
Wait for y/yes (case-insensitive) before proceeding. Anything else cancels.
The model owns this confirmation step — tg itself has its own preview prompt, but we
always pass --yes to suppress it (the in-chat preview is the source of truth).
2. Execute via tg
Call the tg binary with the resolved arguments. The default user shell is zsh, which
will choke on unquoted parens, &, glob characters, accents in odd contexts, etc. — so any
body that is not a single trivial line MUST be sent via a temp file (not inlined, not
naively piped). The --from-file flag exists exactly for this.
tg --yes <personal|automation> "<body>" [--format markdown|html] [--attach <path>]...
cat > /tmp/tg-body.txt <<'EOF'
<paste body verbatim here, including newlines, parens, accents, links, etc.>
EOF
cat /tmp/tg-body.txt | tg --yes <personal|automation> [flags...]
tg --yes <personal|automation> --attach <path>
Why Form B exists: zsh interprets (text), * ?, etc. as patterns. Even inside
printf '%s' '...' the quoting can be lost across the Bash tool's shell wrapper, producing
errors like (eval):1: no matches found: (some text). A heredoc with <<'EOF' (note the
single quotes around EOF — they disable variable and command substitution inside the
heredoc) sidesteps every shell-escaping pitfall in one shot. Piping the file via cat | tg
then delivers the exact bytes through stdin.
Why we pipe instead of using --from-file: tg resolves the body in this order —
inline args > stdin (when piped) > --from-file. When invoked from a non-interactive
shell (like the Bash tool), stdin is not a tty but is empty, so the stdin branch fires
and reads zero bytes — the --from-file flag is silently ignored and tg errors with
"nothing to send". Piping (cat <file> | tg) is the only reliable form: stdin is non-empty
and non-tty, so tg's stdin branch reads the bytes correctly. (--from-file only works
from an interactive terminal — useless to us here.)
Pick Form A only when the body is one short line of plain text. When in doubt, Form B.
tg handles env var validation, dest resolution, and the actual telegram-owl call. If
env vars are missing it exits non-zero with an explicit error like
Error: missing environment variable: TELEGRAM_TOKEN_PERSONAL — surface that to the
user verbatim.
3. Report back
One short sentence: Sent to <dest>. On failure, surface tg's stderr.
Examples
Example 1 — slash, default dest (automation):
/tg "The deployment is complete"
→ Preview, confirm, then tg --yes automation "The deployment is complete".
Example 2 — explicit personal with markdown:
/tg personal --format markdown "**Important** : call your sister"
→ Preview, confirm, then tg --yes personal --format markdown "**Important** : call your sister".
Example 3 — conversational with attachment:
send this to automation with /tmp/report.pdf : Weekly report ready
→ Preview, confirm, then tg --yes automation --attach /tmp/report.pdf "Weekly report ready".
Example 4 — bypass confirmation:
/tg automation --yes "Ping done"
→ No preview, send immediately: tg --yes automation "Ping done".
Example 5 — multi-line body (the common case for shortlists, summaries, etc.):
/tg personal "Line 1
Line 2 (with parens) and an & in the text
Line 3 — accents and dashes: content"
→ Use Form B (heredoc + pipe). Inlining or printf '%s' '...' will break under
zsh on the parens or the &:
cat > /tmp/tg-body.txt <<'EOF'
Line 1
Line 2 (with parens) and an & in the text
Line 3 — accents and dashes: content
EOF
cat /tmp/tg-body.txt | tg --yes personal
Notes
- Do not silently fall back from personal to automation (or vice versa) if a token is missing —
tg already errors explicitly; just relay the message.
- Always pass
--yes to tg since the model handles confirmation in chat. Never let tg
prompt — it would hang.
tg is installed via the nix flake (~/nix/pkgs/tg/); source is tg.sh if you ever
need to inspect what flags are available.
