> Wouldn't it be great if there was something like Pidgin, but entirely command-line based? [...] It turns out there is. It's called Finch, and it's made by th

> Wouldn't it be great if there was something like Pidgin, but entirely command-line based? [...] It turns out there is. It's called Finch, and it's made by the Pidgin folks. Finch is not "command-line based"! Finch is terminal-based, but it takes over your terminal and you interact with it like a mini windowed environment. These are not the same thing. Software is "command-line based" if it's driven from a command line (gdb, ed, mail) or driven from the shell (nmh, git's cli). Years back I actually threw together a libpurple client that decomposed the various actions into utilities that could be run from the shell, to experiment with some UI thoughts. Code is on github (https://github.com/dlthomas/genies/tree/master/msgg https://github.com/dlthomas/genies/tree/master/msgg) but I don't remember what state it's in. Happy to dig in enough to answer any questions posed.