GNUnet Messenger API: July

Hey there,

this month there’s a little progress again on the side of the messenger-cli application:

  • A list of all members in a chat room was added.
  • Private chats will now be listed in the chats overview.
  • A logo has been created which will be added to the application on startup in the close future.
  • The formatting of messages and members got adjusted.
image of messenger-cli chat views

So this how it looks inside a chat room (left side) and you are able to switch to the list of members (right side) by pressing TAB. You can switch back and forth without issues. Pressing ENTER on a member in the list will open a private chat and send them an invitation (this is very similar to the implementation in the GTK interface).

In a chat room you can scroll through the messages or write own text and send it by pressing ENTER. You can also delete any message by selecting it with arrow keys and pressing DELETE.

image of messenger-cli chat selection

You can always go back to a previous overview by pressing ESCAPE, bringing you to the list of chats and the list of accounts. Going further back will close the application.

Next planned steps include:

  • Managing to show multiple views at once if the resolution of the terminal allows it, so users don’t have to switch back and forth as much.
  • Adding lines of meta information into the chat view like showing the date of day as some kind of headline if the messages are from a previous day or older (this will make the column for showing the time consistent but it solves users don’t mix up timestamps).
  • Implementing a way to send and receive files.
  • Implementing a visual representation of invitations to other chats which can be accepted (probably by pressing ENTER).

Also some information regarding the memory leak problematic. I’ve accepted that I can’t really solve this issue since it is relying on ncurses to change something which is quite unlikely because it would probably break their API and therefore a lot of apps. There still seems be a way to debug properly. So that’s probably the way to go.

I really hope I can finish this list of planned steps in August. Then I will probably record some video footage to show using it.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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