Find the useful part

Read a channel, look through a project discussion, or inspect a handful of useful links. Sign in first; the same session works for every command. These examples use fx to make the output immediately explorable.

Open a conversation

indexit -q telegram fetch messages \
  --dialog @example_channel --limit 200 | fx

Replace @example_channel with your channel or group. https://t.me/example_channel works too. A public username can resolve without a populated peer cache.

Messages arrive newest first, with text, dates, available sender information, replies, forwards, and media descriptions. In fx, press / to search the contents or @ to find a field. Try the browser demos.

Remove --limit to walk all available history, or add --timeout 5m to bound the operation. Service events such as “member joined” or “topic created” are skipped.

Find a private conversation

indexit -q telegram fetch dialogs | fx

Find the conversation’s title and copy its uid into --dialog. Listing dialogs populates the peer cache required by numeric IDs and private links. For selection by name, use the fzf workflow.

Look through a particular month

indexit -q telegram fetch messages \
  --dialog @example_channel \
  --from 2026-08-01T00:00:00Z \
  --to 2026-09-01T00:00:00Z | fx

Dates use RFC3339, including Z for UTC or an offset such as +03:00. --from supplies the lower time bound; --to supplies the upper date cursor. These are history windows, not a live snapshot.

For ID-based windows, --min-id 500 requests IDs above 500 and --max-id 1000 requests IDs below 1000. Both ID bounds are exclusive, following Telegram’s history API .

Fetch only the messages you picked

Use singular message when you have exact links:

indexit -q telegram fetch message \
  https://t.me/example_channel/11 \
  https://t.me/example_channel/46 | fx

Or supply IDs directly:

indexit -q telegram fetch message \
  --dialog @example_channel --id 11 --id 46,47 | fx

Links are grouped by dialog and topic in first-seen order. IDs keep their order within each group; duplicates in that group are fetched once. --limit caps the total output across groups. History date/ID windows and --page-size do not apply here.

Missing, inaccessible, service, and out-of-scope messages are skipped. A successful command can return fewer records than requested. Omit -q when you want to see the skip warnings.

Read a link correctly

messages explores history; message selects exact messages. For history, a link identifies the dialog and any explicit topic; its final message number is not applied as a cursor. Use window flags to restrict history.

Continue with topics and media to bring photos home, or jq filters to extract just the fields you need.