undertakingyou

So I asked a while back about a CLI based chat client that supported multiple protocols. I was given the suggestion of finch which really worked quite well. It uses configuration that I have already set up with pidgin. But 90% of the time the formatting was beyond odd. It was difficult to read and rather unintuitive to navigate. So after a little time back with pidgin I decided to look again for a nice CLI chat client to replace pidgin.

I had heard of bitlbee but never used it. It was right there in the ubuntu repos and after a quick aptitude install I was ready to start running. Once the daemon was launched on the machine I used my favourite IRC client, IRSSI, and connected to the localhost bitlbee server. Setup from there was rather a synch. I registered my nick and then added the accounts that I wanted. I added my jabber account, msn account, and yahoo account. I could still add my ICQ account but why? I never chat with anyone on it and any time I get a chat through ICQ it is spam.

Now I can be looking at one great client and be chatting in IRC and Jabber, MSN and yahoo. Pretty cool.