This is an important issue. The comments in this are particularly interesting, including comments by Bradly Kuhn and Karen Sandler.

@Faheem Mitha

does anybody break anybody's GNUcaps?

@mikeserv ??!!

its just a question...

@mikeserv Feel free to star...

@mikeserv Which I don't understand...

stupid wordplay,,, GNU... knee...

@mikeserv Yes, I got that. But I missed the point.

gpl enforcement...

come on. have you never seen a mob movie?

@mikeserv Yes, that's the topic of the post O linked to. What about it?

@mikeserv I try to avoid them. But probably.

probably NOT.

The trouble with dealing with actual criminals is that it kind of takes the appeal out of watching films about them.

Looks like I can't star it. Would someone else, please? I think people should read that article. Thank you.

but they usually get shot in the movies.

Looks like I could pin it. I wonder if I should.

I think I will.

Please star. Thanks.

anyone ever find a decent chat client that avoids using a browser?

@TonyZielinski Define decent. And GUI or Console?

@FaheemMitha Console ideal. Graphical linux desktop application acceptable, too. I'm looking at ChatExchange's API wrapper, but looks like I'll need to do a lot of work to get anything like a console client.

I'm more surprised no one seems to have done it, aside from some outdated looking IRC gateway that sounds like it might have been pretty cool at the time.

@TonyZielinski irssi is a popular IRC client. Does it not work for you?

Oh, sorry I wasn't clear. Looking for a chat client which will interface with stackexchange's chat.

@TonyZielinski Oh, I see. Do such things even exist?

It appears that they had, once upon a time, yes.

@TonyZielinski I see.

it's not too important, but it sounded useful

@TonyZielinski I guess it's useful if you don't have X running.

Or don't want to use a browser for some reason.

As I've mentioned here already, I'm having insane memory bloat problems with Chromium. Even with SE Chat.

Offloading SE Chat to the console might help to mitigate that. Though one would lose most of the features.

Since SE Chat is designed for use with a browser. And any console client would have to be able to deal with SE permission/auth system.

Those are my exact sentiments as well. The ChatExchange API wrapper has an example script. Implements the API and oAuth and everything. It has a simple example readline style client that appears to be working without errors, actually, I just haven't figured it out quite yet.

In a few days I've watched total memory usage go from slightly below 3GB to approximately 4.5GB. And that's all Chromium. I'm not running much else here. Nuts.

yeah, the bloat is my concern as well

getting to the point i kill my browser every time i'm done looking at it

16GB ram, too!

@TonyZielinski Yes, I've got 16GB RAM here as well. And in the recent past, Chromium has forced my machine to start swapping!

The problem is that I run this machine (though it is technically a desktop) 24/7. So the browser does not get restarted. I guess I'll have to start periodically shutting down my browser and restarting it.

Well, it certainly works on stackoverflow chats, just not on SE, for some reason. Says the rooms are frozen. Probably a very good reason for that, like user moderation or something.

@TonyZielinski What works on SO chats? SE chats and SO chats use different servers, I think.

Why is my question downvoted without specifying a reason?

@Wally A couple of things. (I didn't downvote your your question.) (a) You don't actually ask a question (b) Mention what you are trying to do / what your expected behavior is.

Also, usage like sudo apt-get install festival* is fairly unusual. Usually people just list the packages they want to install, not use wildcards.

Ok