Are there any good text-based IM clients?

Question

I'm looking for something that I can run in a linux terminal, so I could ssh into my machine remotely and access the accounts.

A solution that supports all the major IM networks would be great.

Answer 1

I use finch which is a console frontend to libpurple, the Pidgin library. This means you get to use any plugins available for Pidgin.

    NAME
       Finch  -  A Pimpin’ Penguin console frontend to libpurple. Instant Mes‐
       saging client.

    SYNOPSIS
       finch [options]

    DESCRIPTION
       finch is a console-based modular messaging client  based  on  libpurple
       which  is  capable  of  connecting to AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, XMPP, ICQ, IRC,
       SILC, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Zephyr, Gadu-Gadu, and  QQ  all
       at once. It has many common features found in other clients, as well as
       many unique features.  Finch is not  endorsed  by  or  affiliated  with
       America Online, ICQ, Microsoft, or Yahoo.

Centericq (and its fork, CenterIM) seems to be another option, one which I personally have no experience with.

Answer 2

Well, there's for instance BitlBee, which lets you interact with several IM protocols via a text-based IRC client like for instance Irssi or WeeChat.