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You might be interested in Bitlbee, an Open Source IM-to-IRC gateway. Very cool concept, and just works. Public servers, too.

IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features. There is a good console multi-IM client that works well under screen, but has proxy issues.

If you're an IRC user you can try Bitlbee, an IRC gateway to AIM, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. You can even try it right now by connecting to irc.bitlbee.org (I think port 6666 since they're possibly still having problems on 6667 for strange reasons), or testing.bitlbee.org:6667. Sure, you miss out on some features such as sending files and detailed AIM user information, but you get to use your favorite IRC client as well as do scripting.

The server is open-source so you can download and run it locally if you're paranoid; there's a Windows port but I don't know how well that works. There's even a Gentoo package.

It's not exactly the same as IMSmarter, but i've become a giant fan of bittlbee + irssi + screen.

IRC, my friend, IRC is what you want.

If you need to talk to your friends who use IM programs, use Bitlbee.

See the light, walk towards the light, feel the warmth of the geekness.

I still wish they would have just improved on IRC. IRC has been around since the late 1980s, and was a significant improvement over talk. It is open and extensible, and can do everything the popular instant messenging protocols can do, and could before these protocols existed. It can even act as a bridge to instant messenging protocols.

How does it compare to Jabber? Well, IRC is much simpler (try to write IRC with netcat, then try XMPP). Many stable and featureful IRC clients exist for various environments; this is only beginning to happen for Jabber. On the other hand, IRC nicknames have a global namespace, which leads to immense scalability problems. However, the solution to this is obvious and easy to implement.

What I really like about Gaim is the libraries, they have been the basis for many other excellent tools. Like BitlBee http://www.bitlbee.org/, a very nice gateway that allows you to talk to anyone using anything through your irc client. Aterm + Screen + Irssi is my personal favorite communication's suite.

BitlBee Guide - Talk to msn, icq and jabber contacts using any IRC client: http://linuxreviews.org/software/irc/bitlbee/

You are asking for a full featured IRC client. Why not use software that is developed for that specific purpose? If you are that much of an IRC guy, you should check out BitlBee and use instant messaging in your (favourite) IRC client, not the other way around.

I was a Gaim user but wasn't crazy about the interface for IRC, so I went full circle: I now run Yahoo! and AIM inside of my console IRC client using bitlbee. The cool thing is that I can run it on a server with dtach (or Gnu screen) and leave it running 24/7, just attaching to the process from whereever in the world I happen to be. I have set up triggers too and sounds play on all machines in my house when I get a private message.

Try bitlbee - an IRC to IM gateway. I've been using it for sometime and it's superb, I can use my favourite IRC client (irssi) to chat to everyone via an ssh session to my box at home, whatever server room I happen to be holed up in at the time.

Even geekier is bitlbee, an irc gateway to aim/msn/icq/jabber, based on gaim IM code.

My personal preference:

screen + aterm + irssi + bitlbee

Screen is a full screen window manager, keep something running on a server and detach/attach from anywayere

aterm is a nice terminal for X11.

irssi is a CLI irc client. Since Bitlbee acts as a normal IRC server, any IRC client can be used. Even CGI::IRC, there are several sites that allow you to use MSN/ICQ/JABBER/AIM/etc from a web page.

Bitlbee is a IRC gateway server. Basically it's a irc server where you can add IM accounts. The gateway gives you a "irc channel" with ALL your contacts, whatever they are using.

More: BitlBee Guide - Talk to msn, icq and jabber contacts using any IRC client.

NOTE: The setup has TWO flaws:
1) You can not exchange files (no filetransfer).
2) Bitlbee does not support GPG encryption for secure commuciation (available in jabber clients like gjabber and psi).

Rule of thumb: Original IM providers clients are never the best choice.

Oh yes. Screen + Irssi + CenterICQ lets me access my IRC and IM sessions from wherever. Really nice.

• shell: bash
• editor: vim
• email: mutt
• audio playback: cplay front-end
• mixer: aumix
• irc & im: irssi
  • im/irc gateway: bitlbee
• web browser: w3m
• p2p:
• • client:giFTcurs
  • daemon:giFT
• news aggregator: raggle

bitlbee lets you connect to all the major IM networks using your normal irc client. When your mouth-breating, non-irc-using friends send you an instant message, it shows up just as a normal irc privmsg and you can respond in kind.

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

BitlBee is the best addition in the last few years, in my opinion. It's an ICQ/MSN/Jabber etc. client, that appears as an IRC server. Thus you can talk with people who insist on using crappy proprietary IM protocols, using your old trusty text mode IRC clients. This beats any text mode ICQ client I've seen by far.

Granted, this is not strictly a console application, but bitlbee is perfect for those of you who like to use various IM accounts along with IRC. It acts as an IRC server relay to Jabber, AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. What this means is you set up your favorite IRC client (if it's not irssi it should be ;) and connect to the bitlbee server. There's only one channel there, #bitlbee, and @root will help you set your accounts up. Once you've done so, your contacts will join the channel. To talk to them, you /msg them. It's pretty cool.

It does exist. Just use ERC as an IRC client and connect to a BitlBee server.

Aside from the fact that MSN Messenger is a POS right now compared to AIM (they only just got buddy icons, fer christs sake)

I wouldn't know, since for the past 18 months I've been using Gaim 10% of the time and Bitlbee the other 90%. Though somehow I think it's safe to say that, if AIM started charging, people would be all to willing to kiss their buddy icons goodbye

blah blah, i'm an ircaddict too, so have a look at bitlbee.

and to cheer you up, just click on the aol link (quicktime movie) in the article, some funny stuff in there...

I could easily imagine a productive environment based around GNU screen and a terminal-based editor, mail client, news client, and IM client. Throw in something like w3m, and other for images, its good.

Yup, that's pretty close to the way I've worked for most of the last year or two. For me it's screen, of course, along with:

• editor - vim,
• mail client - mutt,
• news client - tin,
• web client(s) - a combination of w3m, lynx, and wget for most downloading tasks,
• spreadsheet - sc, which is surprisingly useful,
• P2P client - mutella, though I think there are console options for other protocols,
• IM/IRC client - irssi along with the fantastic bitlbee (and if you haven't heard of bitlbee before, take a look).

...and then I use good 'ol ratpoison for my window manager in X for the occasions that I need graphics (ie. some web browsing, viewing PDFs, playing graphical games).

Strike that. In most cases, multi-tasking can be very counterproductive. Shell escapes and $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE is good enough.

It varies :-), though I agree generally speaking. I'm using KDE3.2beta at the moment for a bit of a change, though most of the action is still inside my screen(1) terminal(s). You do tend to (or at least I tend to) find yourself more productive when you don't have stray graphical bits and pieces around the place to distract you.

Of course if you need the GUI for your normal working environment (ie. you're developing a GUI app), then, well there's not much you can do but live with it. :)

using bitlbee . i'll just keep the client running and hope it won't disconnect ;)