As of 13 February 2014 this app is deprecated.

This app depends on old Facebook APIs that aren't going to be around much longer. Thanks to all the folks who've used it, and especially everyone who's submitted patches. If a good replacement comes along, I will link to it here.

Update November 2015: messenger.com works well for me as a replacement.

Facebook Messenger for Linux (and Mac!)

A PyQt clone of Facebook Messenger for Windows. It gives you a chat sidebar, chat popup windows, and notification toasts outside of the browser.

If you have all the dependencies, you can launch the app straight from this repository with ./run.sh. After you install it, you can launch it with fbmessenger. Ubuntu users can install from a PPA by following the instructions here (thanks Alin Andrei). Arch users can install from the AUR. There are packaging scripts included under packaging/ for Linux (Debian/Ubuntu in deb, Red Hat/Fedora in rpm, and Arch) and OS X (using the Homebrew package manager). See the README files in packaging subdirectories for more specific instructions. You can also install with sudo python3 setup.py install, but that makes it hard to uninstall, so prefer to use the packaging scripts.

The configuration file is ~/.fbmessenger/config.py. There are a few settings that users might want to mess with:

• Set values like Zoom = 1.2 to make the fonts 20% bigger.
• Set SystemTray = False to disable the system tray icon.
• Normally the app will start minimized to the tray if it was minimized last time it quit. To force it to always start minimized, set MinimizedOnStart = True.

Dependencies

• Python 3
• PyQt4 for Python 3
• Phonon (optional, for sound on Linux)
• setuptools for Python 3