CenterIM Brings Messengers to Your Terminal

Clair Ching — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:53:07 +0000

I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.

Centerim

Pros:

CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
You can have several conversations at the same time.
The screen shows the keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate through the application.
By default, the sound is on so you could hear the ‘ping’ sound when you receive a message.

Cons:

You need to set your terminal to have a dark background because the default colors are hard to see on a white background. If you’re not used to controlling the background of your terminal, then it might feel weird to you.

Going through conversations could feel weird when you’ve got a lot. Pressing the Esc key twice made me go back to the list of buddies I’ve got online so it was easier then.

Enter is not enough. You have to press CTRL-X to enter the message. The “Enter” key just skips a line. It might feel unnatural at first but you could get used to it.

It’s interesting actually. So if you’re looking for a way to chat while you’re on the command line and you don’t want to use an IRC client connecting to a Bitlbee server, then CenterIM is more of a good fit for your needs.

To learn more about CenterIM, here’s the CenterIM website.

Post from: New Linux User

New Linux User » messengers

CenterIM Brings Messengers to Your Terminal