[9fans] Introducing bsflite, AIM for Plan9

[Claudio Leite <cl8189a@american.edu>]

Hello!

 Yesterday there was a comment about Plan 9 lacking an IM client. This is no
longer true; for the past few weeks I've been working on porting my client,
bsflite, from UNIX to Plan 9. So far, thanks to APE this has not been much of
a problem.

 The client is very simple, with a line-based interface reminiscent to a
shell. It has proven to be quite stable, seeing as how I've used it
exclusively for the past year and a half, and have "converted" many of my
friends.

 The latest binary is here:

 http://mordor.tip9ug.jp/who/bsflite/bsflite-20050112.plan9.gz

 also get http://mordor.tip9ug.jp/who/bsflite/README

 To use, simply copy the binary to your path. There is no configuration
needed. In this latest version, I have told it to look for the optional
configuration/profile/buddy list in $home/lib/bsflite/ (is this a good
place?). The files are named "config," "profile" and "buddies," respectively.
Note again that these are optional - view the README for more information.

 Previously, the client was meant to be used under vt, but since that doesn't
support reverse linewrap, the output of the client wasn't as clean as it's
intended. However, I haven't figured out how to get the terminal dimensions
for a rio shell window, and thus it's hardcoded to 80x24. The best way to do
things right now is to run vt, use its resize 80x24 function and quit - the
terminal will remain at the right size, at which point you can run bsflite
without any problems.

 Many thanks to Nashi from tip9ug.jp for help and for providing an account,
and to Thomas Miller for the idea of porting to Plan 9.

--Claudio

-- 
Claudio Leite
- http://leitec.org/
- http://staticky.com/