For some reason I have been on a mission this week to find a way to do all the instant messaging in text only. (I started to explain why but realized that if you don't already know, my reasons are not going to make sense to you either.) This has mostly been an exercise in frustration. Here are the things I tried, and why each one of them sucks, although some suck a lot less than others.

Not considered: gaim, licq

I like gaim just fine, and have been using it for a long time now, but it only comes in GUI form of course. licq, best pronounced lick-q, is something I used to use long ago, along with its predecessor micq. I abandoned it at one point when it was not keeping up with icq protocol changes, but I see it has survived and mutated into GUI form.

naim: ok, but not enough protocol support

naim is an irc/aim program in the style of an irc client. Its interface is a little baroque, but manageable. I'm not sure why I need a two-dimensional space of windows to flip through, using Ins/Del to change between accounts and Tab to change buddies on the current account.

Unfortunately, as the name "naim" might suggest, it really only speaks AIM. Even ICQ is unusable, since it displays buddies by icq number and can't reliably fetch even the nickname to go with the number. This is probably because it is only using TOC (not OSCAR), which means that it's always going to be somewhat retarded compared to e.g. gaim. I used it for a couple of days, but after about the 20th time that I had to search through my old gaim logs just to find out who I was talking to, I decided this was foolishness and dumped it. So long, naim.

centericq: plenty of protocols, blindingly stupid interface

I had high hopes for this one. centericq speaks irc, msn, aim, icq, yahoo, and jabber. It's not irc-style, though, but rather has its own curses scheme:

Looks fancy, but look at how much screen space we are wasting drawing lines and boxes. The top and bottom status lines can be argued to be carrying information, but four more lines on top of those are dedicated to line drawing. (The pink line is my screen session, not centericq's fault.) The curses tree widget wastes even more space indenting every entry for no reason. (gaim does this too.) Pro tip, guys: tree displays are all well and good, but you don't need to indent your first tier of information. I don't need to be cued that everything in the list is a descendant of the useless imaginary "root". You're just wasting space.

None of those extraneous status or buddy-list windows is configurable or resizable, so the end result is that in a program whose purpose is to deliver messages, we have maybe a third of the screen available for delivering messages.

Also note that it is impossible to copy and paste the URL from the screenshot there, unless I have the patience to do it in three parts. There's an F2 button that is supposed to "show URLs," but it does not give you a copyable version either. It serves no purpose whatever, as far as I can tell.

It only gets worse from here. There's no scrollback, so that one third of the screen is all you get. Unless you want to see the event history, so you press control-O. Here you can see what you missed, if you don't mind reading in reverse order. What the hell? And it displays in that same one-third of the screen, but cuts off each message at 50 characters rather than wrap the lines. Oh, there's a full-screen mode if you push F9. Surely it will, you know, fill the screen with messages so I can read them? Nope, full screen mode blanks the screen and displays one event at a time. And the finishing touch, the "Next" and "Prev" functions here do the exact opposite of what they say, because the messages were in reverse order to begin with. At this point I started to worry that I was getting stupider just by looking at this crap, and dumped it. So long, centericq.

There are also maddening bugs that might be the result of a bad compile on my part. It dumped core four times in a day of trying to use it, and it mysteriously drops keystrokes at random. Point at a buddy list group for example, and press Enter a bunch of times. Group goes up, group goes down, group goes up, group goes down, nothing, group goes up, group goes down, nothing.

(I cleverly smudged out the names in the screenshot because some people I know would flip out if I gave away their s00per s3kr1t im names. The horror! My im names are right here on this page, obviously.)

bitlbee: sounds incredibly awkward but works

I put bitlbee off until last because it sounds like such a kludge, a daemon that translates various IM messages into irc channels, but they have won me over. The idea here was to separate the protocol support from the interface, so you can just go on using whatever irc client you already like. It turns out to not be as clumsy as I thought; bitlbee force-joins you to a control channel where you set up your accounts and do whatever you might want to do to your buddy list. I would rather just remember "add aim mdickers47" than stumble through curses menus using whatever weird combination of F-keys and ctrl-keys some dude picked. And of course irc support is a non-issue since you are already in an irc client--the others tend to handle irc a little wonkily because it's pretty different from the newer buddy-oriented systems.

So for now, bitlbee is where it's at. The Unix Philosophy wins again. Incidentally, if you are someone that happens to have an account on my machine named redlance, that means you can try it too. Just log in and start irssi or epic, then connect to localhost.

07 Aug 2006 03:04 PT - persistent link - trackback - 2 comments