Get Curfloo!
Tired of having to use a full-blown GUI just to have a text-based chat? Tired of getting kicked out of Yahoo chat by every clueless idiot who is told about the latest Java chat client exploit? Tired of the neon decorations, fades, fonts, and multi-colored output of many chat clients that interfere with reading? Tired of the chat-hogging, window-scrolling flood of repeated messages by visiting irritants (spammers)?
Curfloo to the rescue!
Some features/commands in Curfloo: online help, color or monochrome, pop-up chatters list box, PM history, onscreen menus, screenshot, input history, line- or page-at-a-time scrolling of the chat window, Tab auto-completion, shell command output to chat, emotes, custom 'away' messages, text area buffer clear, follow, goto, join, ignore (ignore does not suffer from the Yahoo 99 ignore limit, so you can ignore the entire porn-spam botlist available from http://www.eds.org/~straycat/bots, invite, logoff, roll (rolls x number of n-sided die), tell, think, version display, who ("friends" list), ksh/vi emulation, and user-defined commands.
Curfloo works on Linux systems and FreeBSD (see the README and Makefile for FreeBSD). At this time, dependencies include ncurses-devel, glibc-devel, libstdc++-devel and g++ (v2.95). All of these are available at http://freshmeat.net, http://sourceforge.net, http://www.rpmfind.net, or probably on your Linux distribution CDROM(s). (If you are running an rpm-based system such as Redhat, Mandrake, Caldera, or SuSE, you can use these commands to check: rpm -q ncurses-devel, rpm -q glibc-devel, rpm -q libstdc++-devel, rpm -qf /usr/bin/g++).
It performs an amazing number of functions, including login, clean text display, a full suite of chat commands, and so much more that does not show. Yet it does this with a file size that rivals simple text editors and is about one-third the size of many IRC clients.