Content

• About the project
What is tmsnc?
Can I contribute to this project?
Where do I report bugs?
• Installing tmsnc
How do I obtain tmsnc?
What is a 'SVN' release?
I've got tmsnc. How do I install?
I can't compile tmsnc: conflicting types for `wchar_t'
• Using tmsnc
'~/.tmsnc' configuration
Colors
Sounds
Logs
My backspace doesn't work (XTerm)

About the project  top

Tmsnc is a textbased (console) MSN client written in C. Tmsnc should work on most Unix (Linux, BSD, MacOS) compatible operating systems. The goal of this project is to create a client like MSN Messenger (with sound, webcam and file transfer support), but without any graphical features. Instead tmsnc has an interface written in NCurses, a library for textbased terminal interaction.

Of course you can! It is an open-source project which means that anyone may download and alter the source code. If you make changes to the source you think other people could make use of, please make a patch between your code and the SVN source tree and send it to sanoix[AT]gmail[DOT]com or post the patch in the forum under 'development'.

Preferably you post a message in the "Bugs" section of the forum or you can send an e-mail to sanoix[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Make sure that you include as much information as possible, i.e. when and where it occurs, GDB back-trace and version number.

Installing tmsnc  top

To download the latest stable version of TMSNC you go to the download section of this page. Here you can also find pre-compiled binaries for some systems. The source code has the extension .tar.gz. You extract the so called tarball by running the command 'tar zxvf tmsnc-x.x.x.tar.gz'.

The SVN release of tmsnc is the latest development version available, that is the version that the developers of tmsnc are currently working on. This means that it could be unstable, but often it has more new features than the stable versions. To download the SVN version of tmsnc you run must have subversion installed. Then you can run the command 'svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/tmsnc' in a terminal to download the source.

First, change your current working directory to the top directory of tmsnc. Then run the './configure' script. See './configure --help' for available options. After you've done this a so-called makefile will be generated, this allows you to run the 'make' command which will compile the program. When that has been done you can run 'make install' as root to install tmsnc.

Here is a typical successful build of tmsnc

$ tar zxvf tmsnc-x.x.x.tar.gz
$ cd tmsnc-x.x.x
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you get this error when compiling tmsnc

In file included from common.h:19,
                 from misc.c:18:
/usr/include/ncurses.h:251: error: conflicting types for `wchar_t'
/usr/include/stdlib.h:51: error: previous declaration of `wchar_t'

Using tmsnc  top

To download the latest stable version of TMSNC you go to the download section of this page. Here you can also find pre-compiled binaries for some systems. The source code has the extension .tar.gz. You extract the so called tarball by running the command 'tar zxvf tmsnc-x.x.x.tar.gz'.

To change the colors in the interface is simple. In ~/.tmsnc/tmsnc.conf you uncomment the color_x lines and replace the number with the number corresponding to the color you want. For example if you want a yellow logo, you make a line say "color_1=3". If you leave the color_xxx lines commented, tmsnc will use the default colors.

If you don't like colors and want to disable them, you uncomment all the color_x lines and set them all equal to -1. This will make TMSNC use the terminal's pre-set fore-color.

To enable sounds in tmsnc here's what you should do. You need to install a command-line sound player. I recommend 'sox'. If you install sox you will have an executable called 'play' on your system which then can be used to play sound files.

Now go and find yourself a nice set of sound files for the following events: a contact logged in, an error has occured and someone has sent you a new message. Just search google for 'free sound effects' or something like that.

Put these files in '~/.tmsnc/sounds' and edit '~/.tmsnc/tmsnc.conf'. Uncomment and give values to the 'sound_player', 'sound_login', 'sound_error' and 'sound_newmsg' variables. The next time you start tmsnc you should have sound support. Make sure that you are in the 'audio' group. Otherwise it might not work.

As of version 0.2.0, tmsnc automatically logs all conversations by default. The logs can be found in '~/.tmsnc/logs'. To disable login, there's an option for this in '~/.tmsnc/tmsnc.conf'.

If you use XTerm you might experience some problems with getting the backspace key to work as it should. Adding the line

to ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources will hopefully fix this problem.