/ blessed

Introducing GitterCLI

Hello everybody! I'm happy to announce that –at the day of writing this post– GitterCLI is on version v0.6.0 containing more and better features.

GitterCLI is a extremely simple Gitter client for your terminal.

GitterCLI it's a terminal application based on Blessed.

Commands & Behaviours

➜  ~  gitter-cli

  Usage: gitter-cli [options] [command]


  Commands:

    join|j [name]        Join a room with the specified name.
    authorize|set-auth   Set the access-key token for client authentication.
    whoami|me            Display your user information based on the existing token.

  Options:

    -h, --help       output usage information
    -V, --version    output the version number
    --token [token]  Set the access-key token for client authentication. This won't be persisted.

Display of gitter-cli help dialog.

Authorization

gitter-cli-authorization

It uses your personal Gitter token to authenticate you. The only way this will happen is if you provide it with the set-auth command. Like: gitter-cli set-auth <<Your personal token>>.

After that, the program will save the token in a secrets.json file that lives on the application core module. You can modify it any time you'd like, directly modifying the file or calling the set-auth command again.

I'm planning to use the OS X Keychain (if it's available) on future versions.

Room join

gitter-cli-join-room

When joining a room, the application will display a loading screen while release the connection with Gitter.

If it's successful, it will instantiate Blessed to display *basically to big widgets: The message input (which is a Blessed.Textarea) and the chat history (or board, which is a custom widget that inherits from Blessed.Box).

If it's not, it will display a message (simple Blessed.Message) to let the user know the error and it will close the process after three seconds.

Chat History

Previously, I used Blessed.List for the chat history but the lag was too intense. So I decide to create a custom widget, the reason of that is to have children as a list of messages which are also custom widgets that knows how to display their format correctly and delete all the lists interactivity methods that were unnecessary for our case.

Using marked, wordwrap and html-to-text it allows me to display rich information on the message lists without any trouble, also we can see emojis there 🎉.

gitter-cli-with-emojis