utalk

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What is utalk?

utalk is a planned replacement for the Unix 'talk' client, which uses a more responsive protocol built over UDP (instead of TCP). It is written in C.

Warning - this is an unnumbered early beta version of utalk; the core protocol as well as most of the user interface is done, but a number of planned features are missing.

It is not clear whether I will ever complete utalk to the point where I'd put it out as a 1.0 version, namely handling multiple connections and figuring out a way to insert text. As it is now, it's actually quite stable and usable, just limited to overstrike mode, and to a single talk partner.

utalk features:

utalk uses a protocol, based on UDP, which ensures a quick response even over links with high packet loss, by displaying information as it arrives even if it is out of order. So if you type "hello world" and the "w" is lost, the other party sees "hello orld", and a few seconds later the "w" pops into place.
utalk allows editing of previously typed text, including scrollback, deletion and overstrike. For technical reasons, it is not possible to insert text other than at the end of a line, or to insert lines.
When scrolling back in your text window, you can either have the remote party's display scroll too, or not.
utalk is fully 8-bit clean, but translation of iso_8859_1 codes into 7-bit ASCII can be activated for 7-bit terminals.
utalk can talk to both the old BSD 4.2/Sun talk daemon and the newer BSD 4.{3,4} one, and users on machines having a different daemon each can connect to each other. To distinguish utalk rings from ordinary talk rings, utalk sends the username prefixed with a '!'.
utalk lets you rebind your keys, and includes (limited) vi and emacs emulation modes.
you can define aliases for addresses of people to ring or hostnames to ring them on.
new! you can set a "topic" for the conversation.

Wishlist:

support for n-way talk sessions.
a compatibility mode to interact with standard Unix talk clients.
a way to insert text (?)

Downloading:

Download the latest utalk in tarred and gzipped (compressed) form: utalk-beta.tar.gz
Read the README
Read the formatted man page for utalk
Read about the utalk PROTOCOL
To see other stuff I've programmed/hacked, see here

License:

utalk is distributed under the GNU General Public License:


    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
    any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

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