Completely Going the CLI Way -> Finch… | It's (not) Alright

Completely Going the CLI Way -> Finch…

I am back with another post from the CLI series. This time it is a console IM client. People using Linux would surely have heard about pidgin, formerly knows as gaim. Pidgin is an IM that has support for,

AIM
Bonjour
Gadu-Gadu
Google Talk
Groupwise
ICQ
IRC
MSN
MySpaceIM
QQ
SILC
SIMPLE
Sametime
XMPP
Yahoo!
Zephyr

Finch, is a fork of pidgin. It has support for all the protocols stated above but it does not have a GUI. It is built using nCurses and so the UI is elegant enough. Finch tries to imitate the GUI of pidgin. I could not find any good guides about using finch, so, I set it up with a friend of mine, Mehul Ved and we found some things out.

It turns out that the man page for Finch is through and written very well. Using that we connected to Gmail chat and I am using it now chatting with him.

Finch UI is a little confusing at first, but once you get used to it, it looks cool. It supports mouse integration also. The only problem we could find (actually, he found it.. he uses ratPoison… more on that later in some post) was that finch cannot be used with Screen. That was kind of shocking since I too am using screen for almost all the applications these days. Using screen screws up the keyBindings. So, we will try and sort out some keyBindings and see if changing them can help solve the only problem we have faced till now. More info on the ManPage.

All in all, a good IM. I still say, I will use irssi as an IRC client for console. But for all other protocols, finch looks like the thing to use. It looks hot, easy on resources, based on pidgin, so the performance is solid.

Links

Posts in the series, Going the CLI Way :-

rTorrent, going the CLI way…
Completely going the CLI way…
Completely Going the CLI Way, mp3blaster…
Contab and mp3blaster -> Alarm Clock
Completely going the CLI Way - rTorrent - a Review…
Cron and mp3blaster -> Alarm Clock II
Completely Going the CLI Way -> Finch…
Cron + MPD + MPC => Alarm Clock…

Submit Article :- Finch…&Url=http://blog.adityashevade.com/2008/06/21/completely-going-the-cli-way-finch/" title="BlinkList Submit" target="_blank" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php_amp_Description=Completely_Going_the_CLI_Way_-_Finch_8230_amp_Url=http_//blog.adityashevade.com/2008/06/21/completely-going-the-cli-way-finch/');"> BlinkList + Finch…&url=http://blog.adityashevade.com/2008/06/21/completely-going-the-cli-way-finch/" title="Blogmarks" target="_blank" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1_amp_title=Completely_Going_the_CLI_Way_-_Finch_8230_amp_url=http_//blog.adityashevade.com/2008/06/21/completely-going-the-cli-way-finch/');">Blogmarks + Finch…" title="Submit Post to Digg" target="_blank" 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Posted in: Console, Internet, Linux, Software, Tools

Tags: Console, Internet, IRC, Linux, Software, Tools

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 1:13 am and is filed under Console, Internet, Linux, Software, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Completely Going the CLI Way -> Finch…”

mehul June 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 am

Smells like geek spirit.

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