Sometimes you can’t avoid it, you might have to work with computers without GUI such as on a dedicated server or when you are working on a remote computer.
Nevertheless for some reason you might find a need to communicate with other people through yahoo messenger or MSN, and when you don’t have the fancy XOrg, then this might be the solution for instant messaging on a console environment.
No. 1- Finch
http://pidgin.im
Finch is a console base frontend to libpurple which is used by Pidgin (formerly gaim). As such Finch shares a lot of similarities with its GUI counterpart, including the account settings.
Finch tries it best to be consistent with Pidgin, down to the account setting interface. The navigation interface is a bit confusing at first, but once you’ve mastered it you can easily switches the chat screen from one person to another.
The best thing about Finch is, it can be extended using plugins as Pidgin. Finch also can double-up as an IRC client if necessary though there are more suitable alternatives such as irssi and BitchX for the CLI environment.
No. 2- CenterIM (CenterICQ)
http://www.centerim.org/
Another ncurses-based instant messenger client that I find handy is centerim which supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, LiveJournal, and Gadu-Gadu IM protocol.
At first glance, Centerim seems to offer more configuration options than Finch. The text interface also has more contrast and easily readable than Finch. What makes it more interesting to use is that you can decide the placement and the size of ncurses interface more independently than whats offered in Finch.
The chat and buddy interface is much more intuitive than Finch and the user can navigate through the multiple interface with relative ease. This is mainly attributed to Centerim places hint on the interface so the user knows what to do in order to keep the conversation going.
My Thoughts
Overall I would prefer to use Centerim over Finch in any given time because centerim interface is much more easy to navigate and use compared to Finch. Although Finch can be customised or extended with its plugin architecture, that is hardly useful to me compared to a useful user interface
[tags]pidgin,im,yahoo,yahoo messenger,ym,gaim,centerim,icq,msn,google talk,gtalk,internet,chat,chatting[/tags]
