A Guide to Using Finch - Terminal-Based Chat Client

[ Thanks to Chris7mas for this link. ]

"Finch is a TUI (text user interface) IM client for Linux which uses libpurple, the same library on which the GNOME IM client Pidgin is based on. Usually, if you have Pidgin installed, you should have Finch too, unless Pidgin was compiled with the text interface option disabled. In addition to this, Finch supports every protocol that Pidgin supports, and even though it is a terminal-based application, it offers enough configuration options, and more can be done using the .gntrc configuration file, which is discussed later in this guide. If not, installing the latest Finch release, even from source, should be easy.

"To install it in Ubuntu, open a terminal and type sudo apt-get install finch or use the Ubuntu Software Centre to search for it and install it. On Debian, you can install the older version from the repositories, or use this guide to compile and install the latest version. Yahoo! for example changed its protocol, so the version which comes included in Debian Lenny is not able to connect to it."

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