First time using Peepochat, or just having trouble using the client? No worries, this guide is intended to give you the rundown on how to effectively use the app across multiple chatrooms. Once you’ve understood the basics, you can move on to customizing it to your liking and making it yours.

Setting up Peepochat

As a new user, when you open the app you’ll get asked if you either want to:

• Start fresh → this is a blank slate, and where you should begin. You login with your account and are presented with the default chatting experience.

• Restore a backup → this is where you provide a backup file to restore all of your channels, splits, and settings all in one go. If it’s your first time using the app, you won’t have one.

An important concept to understand with Peepochat, is that all of your data is stored in your browser. Your preferences aren’t kept in a database on a random server, it’s all on your machine. This means, if you want to carry your settings between devices you’ll have to export and restore a backup.

Onboarding process

For the sake of this guide, we’re going to assume you want to start fresh with all the default settings. As such, there are 3 main steps to the onboarding process - logging in, picking a channel, and finishing up.

1. Logging in → login with the account you want to send messages with. The client will let you know all the permissions needed from your account, as well as why they’re needed.

2. Picking a channel → this is the first chatroom that you want to join with the client. It can be any channel on Twitch. You can join your own channel, or join my channel - rcwOwO as an example. Don’t worry, you can join many more later.

3. Finishing up → this last step is optional, and will ask you to bookmark the page so you can easily get back to it, as well as letting you enable notifications for features like pings and live notifications.

Once you’ve gone through the steps, your client should look very similar to mine. Congratulations! You’ve setup Peepochat and are now ready to start joining more channels and making it yours.

The default layout of Peepochat.

Channels and Splits

Unlike other chat clients, Peepochat adopts a “Discord-like” sidebar where you can manage all the channels you’re in. You can add new channels, or split existing ones to create customizable side-by-side layouts to your liking.

Adding channels

Adding a channel to the sidebar is very simple. Click the plus icon at the bottom of the sidebar, located in the bottom left corner of the window. This will display a popup where you can type in the name of the channel you want to add your sidebar.

The popup to add a channel.

Once you hit Enter or click the “Add channel” button, you should see your active channel change and the sidebar showing a new channel added to the list.

Creating a Split

Once you’ve started to add more and more channels to the sidebar, you might want to start combining them into “splits” - these appear as one channel in your sidebar but let’s you display multiple chatrooms at once in a layout of your liking.

Creating a split is very simple:

1. Navigate to one of the channels you want to split.

2. Right click the other channel you want to split with, and click the Split with… button to create a split.

The right-click menu for a channel in the sidebar.

This will create a split in your sidebar, with a default side-by-side layout, like the one shown in the example below. Allowing you to view two chatrooms at the same time.

Screenshot showing the created split.

Managing layouts

Now that you’ve added one or more channels to a split, you may want to rearrange them in a way you see fit. Let’s say, for example, you had one chat that you primarily use and two other chats that you still want to keep an eye on. You could arrange them in a way that prioritizes the screen real-estate of one chat more than the other.

There are two main ways that you can manipulate a layout, resizing and arranging.

Resizing a layout

To change the size of a chat pane within a split, you simply grab the line separating either a column or row and drag it to the desired size.

Arranging layouts

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can also arrange a split in a combination of columns or rows to create the ideal layout you want. This allows you to prioritize a chatroom and get an “at-a-glance” view of related chatrooms.

To move a chat pane or create a column consisting of multiple rows, you simply grab and hold the top bar of the chat pane. As you start moving the top bar, you can drop it in various positions indicated by the client to move it in the arrangement you see fit.

Mastering composing messages

Now that you’ve created your ideal layouts for the channels you’ve joined, maybe it’s time to start chatting! Like any other chat client you’ve seen, you can start chatting instantly by simply typing a message into the input box and either hitting Enter or the send button next to the input box.

But what if you wanted to add some emotes to your messages?

There are 3 ways that you can add emotes to your messages:

1. The emote picker.

2. Using colon-completion.

3. Using tab-completion.

The emote picker

In the input box, you will notice a little smile emoji near the send button. When you click on it, you will be presented with an emote picker that will let you sort through various emotes that you have access to.

This can include your subscriber emotes, earned emotes through Twitch, third-party emotes, and global emotes across the various supported platforms. Emotes are sorted by their size, and then in an alphabetical order.

To add an emote to your message, you simply click the one that you want to add, and it’s name will be added to your message.

Screenshot showing the emote picker, with the "arf" emote highlighted.

Colon-completion

Chat can be quite fast-paced, and you may not want to spend the time opening the emote picker to find or search for an emote, in which case you may want to try using the colon-completion feature to find the emote that you’re looking for.

Whenever you are typing a message, simply hit the colon (:) button on your keyboard and start typing the name of an emote. As you type, you will see a list of all the available emotes that you can navigate through using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Once you’ve found the correct emote, you can either hit Tab or Enter to confirm that it’s the emote you’re looking for, and it will be added to your message.

Screenshot of what colon-completion appears like.

Tab-completion

This is more tailored towards power users that already know many emote names, and simply want to speed-up the amount of time it takes to type the name of one. Additionally, tab-completion has some key differences from the methods shown above. Notably:

• No additional UI is displayed when you tab-complete.

• Your searches are prefix-based. For example in the screenshot above, if we started a tab-completion with the same query, “omegad” - only “OMEGADANCE” and “OMEGADANCEBUTFAST” would be options you could cycle through, since they both are prefixed with the term “omegad”.

Starting a tab-completion is very easy. You simply start typing the name of the emote you want to autocomplete and hit Tab. You can continue to hit tab until you hit the emote that you’re looking for. Once you’ve found it, you can just keep typing the rest of your message. As soon as you start typing a new character your tab-completion session will close and you can start another one by hitting Tab.