Can we have a linux terminal chat client for gmail?

Question

Does a gmail terminal chat client exist or anyway one can write it?

Answer 1

Yes. Gmail uses the Jabber chat protocol which has been around for much longer than gchat and is supported by a number of open source command line chatting programs. One of my favorite terminal chat clients is Centericq which supports jabber along with many other chat protocol. It is ncurses based:

To connect to gchat use these settings:

Username: Your Google Talk username (without any @ symbol or domain information)
Password: Your password
Login Server: Enter the portion of your email address after the @ symbol. For example, gordon@example.com will enter example.com as the Login Server value.
Use SSL: Yes
Manually specify connection host: Yes
Host: talk.google.com
Port: 5223
Keep connection alive: Yes

Answer 2

Part of the Pidgin IM client is a terminal based client called Finch. Take a look at the Using Finch page on the Pidgin wiki.

Answer 3

MCabber should also work just fine. It supports OTR also (which is crucial if we talk about Google and nowadays internet).

(MCabber is my favorite by the way. I tried all the alternatives but this seemed to be the best so far. It just works, it's just excellent.)

Answer 4

Bitlbee provides an IRC interface to most of the common chat protocols. Mix with Irssi or your CLI IRC client of choice.

Answer 5

sudo apt-get install irssi-plugin-xmpp