[ 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.”