SE Chat Terminal

What is this?

This is a chat client that runs in the terminal using SE's improptu chat APIs and the raw power of Node.JS.

It's still in early beta development, but the following commands/features work so far:

• Talking
• Reading chat
• Connecting to multiple chat domains
• Starring, editing, deleting, joining and leaving rooms
• Noticing special events as notable occurences (see the star_threshold note of the config section)
• Being able to see deleted and edited messages originals (it's not a self-modifying feed like SE)

How to get started

To get started, build the required plugins by calling:

 npm install

Then, read your username and password in using the command line tool, read:

 read -s PASSWD
 <enter your password>
 read EMAIL
 <enter your email>

and then you can use the email= and password= flags to specify which:

node start email=$EMAIL password=$PASSWD

In the main folder, you'll find a config-SAMPLE.json

Copy this to a config.json file and see the section below on how to setup the config file.

Navigate to the folder in Terminal/CMD, and call

 node start.js

config

In the main folder, you'll find a config-SAMPLE.json

Copy this to a config.json file.

In the sample file, you'll find three variables that you'll need to interact with:

• debug
• star_threshold
• room_domains

debug

debug is a boolean that represents whether you want system messages, (such as join responses, connection losses) to appear alongside the chat events in the main feed.

(defaults to false)

---

star_threshold

star_threshold is an integer representing the amount of stars a post must get before it appears in the chat feed

(defaults to 5)

---

room_domains

This variable is a little more complicated.

It's an object where the keys are the domain names (StackExchange, MetaStackExchange and StackOverflow (upper or lower case doesn't matter))

     "room_domains": {
          "stackexchange": {
               // ...
          }
     }

Inside that, you have the rooms object, which contains all the rooms you want to automatically connect to upon startup

They're structured where the room id is the key and inside that, you have

• room_id
• name

---

Sample config

Here is a sample config of chat.meta.stackexchange.com, where you connect to Tavern on the Meta upon startup

"MetaStackExchange": {
    "rooms": {
         "89": {
            "name": "Tavern on the Meta",
            "room_id": 89
         }
    }
},

---

What you need to do to your SE account before you can use this:

• Make sure you have an SE, SO and MSE account with the minimum rep to talk in chat (15).

For SE, this just means you need 15 rep on any one site, but for MSE and SO, you need 15 rep specifically on those sites. You can just get this by making edits or something (but don't make pointless edits please)

• Make sure your password and email is correct

There is an error message for this, but I'm still going to say it anyway.

---

Where to from here?

There's a few crucial things I need to fix before taking this to StackApps, and the attention of more than the beta users.

Specifically, Milestone version 2.

I may convert this entirely to Python, as Python's input handling is so much smoother (and native).

---

License

This code is licensed under the MIT license.