The Terminal Messenger

A centralized messaging service available right in your terminal. Now, you never have to leave your workspace again.

We created a TCP server to relay messages back and forth between multiple users in a singular chatroom, and created a basic terminal UI with the NCURSES library. Basic test suite and pylint passing.

Persistent messages coming soon! Once we stop re-implementing it... 👀

Backstory

This project began as a quick test. After both of us had some web development experience under our belts, we wanted a better understanding of how the underlying infrastructure of the web works. So, we began working on a small messaging service to communicate with each other. And it spiralled from there.

Core Features

• message one on one with another client
• group messaging
  • public forums anyone can read and write messages to
  • private chatrooms which users add other users to
• add names to messages
• Persistence
  • accounts for users
  • message history
• multi threaded server (for things like handling client handshake in own function, handling even more messages/chatrooms,etc)
  • handling a client-server handshake
  • better performance and management for multiple messages/chatrooms
• keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys
  • 'ctrl-z', 'ctrl-u', etc
• restructuring project to follow a legitimate package and API (logging class, better import system, class and configuration)
  • run tests out of one file/command

Bonus Features

DevOps

• packaging it with pypy
• dockerize it
• have different subdomains for the different services of our application (e.g. http server)
• script to scrape for all errors in server.log, or a certain number of them, like tail for errors (sed?)
• horizontal scaling with a load balancer
• add a domain name
• comply with ICMP protocol to allow for 'ping'

Terminal Client

• formatting with ncurses
• adding useful text commands (/join to join a chatroom, /l to list public chatrooms)
• image rendering
• text search for previous messages
• message scroll
• mouse up to get past messages and load previous messages on scroll
• scrollable input area for long messages
• input autocomplete(?)
• emojis
• split terminal for multiple chatrooms
• autocomplete for text commands
• sidebar with metadata for chatroom and options for interacting with multiple chatrooms
• pretty colors :)
• add messages for users that connected/disconnected to the chatroom
• speech recognition
• on sleep/disconnection, display 'disconnected' and try to reconnect on message send
• terminal multiplexer, work in the terminal on one pane and message in the other
• text formatting in input window: shift+\n for newline, etc.
• execute python code and sends the output to the server

Terminal Server

• admin privileges to starters of group messages/chatrooms, etc.
• hidden file with username and password saved to not type in username and password every time (almost like a cookie)
• send messages to other endpoints (SMS, Facebook, Slack, etc)
• allow a user to specify how long their (or any other, perhaps) messages will persist for

Security

• encryption
• security (blocking ips, etc)
• prevent injection/other exploits to server
• defend against unknown information/requests

HTTP Server

• TEMP static HTML page that we serve (with web server) about the project (until HTTP server server are established)
• user/message history
• Data analytics (possibly integrated with the client by default?)
• Full-text search
• and more?

WebSockets Client

• gain the ability to send messages from terminal to browser client and vice versa
• create a desktop app to accompany the browser version of the client
• allow the ability to send images (convert images to ascii art for the terminal?)
• integrate all other terminal client features