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30Mar

MCabber: A Command-line-only Multi-protocol IM Client

4

Command-line geeks, it's time to stay focused on your terminals and not switch to X back-and-forth when chatting with your buddies.

mcabber is a small Jabber console client.
mcabber includes features such as SSL support, MUC (Multi-User Chat) support, history logging, command completion, OpenPGP encryption, OTR (Off-the-Record Messaging) support and external action triggers.

As you can see, MCabber is just a Jabber client, so you can't use it to connect to your favorite IM servers like MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk,...

However, you can use it to connect to these networks with little effort. All you have to do is to install OpenFire (or any Jabber server software) and enable the GatewayIM plugin. From its name, this plugin enables you to connect to other IM networks. Just create an account on your Jabber server through its nice web interface and configure it with other networks login information. Next, let MCabber connect to your server and do everything you love.


To install MCabber on Debian/Ubuntu just type:

sudo apt-get install mcabber

Before you connect with the server, you have to configure MCabber first. The only mandatory configuration is server address, port, username (jid format: username@servername, you can know the servername from OpenFire admin console) and password. You can start with the example configuration file by copying it to your home directory:



cd $HOME
mkdir -p .mcabber/histo
zcat /usr/share/doc/mcabber/examples/mcabberrc.example.gz > .mcabber/mcabberrc

So far, I have been talking about old stuff; anything cool here?
A great functionality of MCabber is that you can write an external script in any language and let it handle IM events like message received, buddy logged in, ...
I have written a bash script which plays some nice sounds (got them from Pidgin) on some events, so that you don't have to poll mcabber "window" to watch for new messages! You can download the script from here.

The script also "says" the jid of the buddy logging in/out! However, you need to install festival before you can use this feature:


sudo apt-get install festival

Don't forget to turn on execution bit or it won't be able to run.

chmod u+x $HOME/.mcabber/event-handler.sh


Also, don't forget to edit mcabberrc to tell it to use that script for handling events


set events_command = /your/home/directory/.mcabber/event-handler.sh

Written By:

Hosam Hammady

Comments

1 McKael wrote: on Tuesday, April 07, 2009:

Actually you _can_ use MCabber to connect to the GTalk server, as it is based on XMPP (Jabber) protocol!

Mikael

2 Hosam Hammady wrote: on Monday, August 10, 2009:

Yes you can of course connect to GTalk, but to connect to other networks simultaneously, you should do the trick shown!

3 Hosam Hammady wrote: on Monday, August 10, 2009:

I have just discovered the link to the script is not working, use this instead please:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1717467/event-handler.sh

4 web development wrote: on Wednesday, October 14, 2009:

Hey, that was interesting,

this looks so geeky, and for that reason it is great

Thanks for writing, most people don't bother.

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