ningen provides abstractions that override Arikawa's existing state to provide behaviors more similar to the official client with more aggressive caching.

Using ningen is similar to using *state.State, but you'd be handling around *ningen.State instead. Typically, it might look like this:

s, err := state.New(os.Getenv("TOKEN"))
if err != nil {
	return errors.Wrap(err, "failed to create state")
}

n, err := ningen.FromState(s)
if err != nil {
	return errors.Wrap(err, "failed to wrap state")
}

if err := n.Open(); err != nil {
	return errors.Wrap(err, "failed to open connection to Discord")
}

return startApp(n)

Afterwards, *ningen.State can be used as if it is *state.State. The new state will transparently behave more similarly to the official client.

In addition to wrapping, *ningen.State also adds a few more stores that the client can use:

• n.NoteState keeps track of known user notes, which can be seen on the client by clicking the profile picture of a user.
• n.ReadState allows seeing which channels are not read as well as allowing the client to asynchronously mark a channel as read.
• n.MutedState keeps track of which channels, categories and guilds are muted.
• n.EmojiState keeps track of the user's emojis; it returns the appropriate guild emojis depending on whether or not the user has Nitro.
• n.MemberState provides a way to lazily fetch the right-hand side member list seen in the official client. It also provides an asynchronous guild subscription API for listening to typing events.
  • Sometimes, in large guilds, messages may not be received from the gateway. This might mean that a guild subscription is required.
• n.RelationshipState keeps track of which users are blocked or are friends.

For detailed documentation of each state, see the reference documentation.

ningen also provides a built-in Discord Markdown parser using goldmark. For an example on how to implement a custom Markdown renderer that is compatible with ningen, see md/renderer.go.