Testing finch (of pidgin)

Today I took some time to test finch, the text-mode client of Pidgin.
Since Cicq is really buggy and if you look at the code in my opinion its obvious that it was konst's first bigger OpenSource project (he said this in an interview). Also CenterIM is not really an option for me as long as a huge part of the code base shares centericq code.

Finch comes with a nice Ncurses interface which looks totally different compared with most text-mode clients I know. It is like Pidgin ported to curses, you
have windows which pop-up if someone writes a message to you, you can move/close and resize them.

Thats somehow strange but looks cool:



The default window managment is somehow limited, but it is possible to write your own window management and there is also an example included.
From the protocol view finch is able to use AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, QQ, SIMPLE, Yahoo, Zephyr and MSN which should be enough for centericq users.

Compared with centericq one advantage is that you are able to configure keybindings via a text file (also colors etc.). Contact lists are not stored with directories like in centericq but with XML files.
Another good point is that chat logs are stored as plaintext, you are able to configure the sorting of your contacts and file transfers work. Offline messages and history buffers in conversations are shipped
as plugins. You also have a complete debug window where you can see for example the transferred XML in a jabber session, so you don't need a sniffer for debugging.

But there are also some drawbacks. For example you just have one input line, centericq was more like a (very bad) text-editor.
The biggest deficiency for me is that finch only works well in UTF-8 capable terminals and UTF-8 locales.
While that's the future it should support also non-UTF-8 environments. If you type some umlauts on non-UTF-8 for example and press enter, the program will segfault. If some developer reads this, http://paste.debian.net/27377 is the backtrace, I don't wanted to create an account in trac just for reporting a bug.
A quote from IRC:

16:19 < someguy> nion_: while that is a bug, it is not likely to change in the near future
16:20 < nion_> someguy: why not?
16:20 < someguy> nion_: because fixing it is hard, and not a priority
16:20 < someguy> nion_: patches would be welcome, I'm sure
16:23 < someguy> nion_: I think, currently, it's more in the "YMMV" category

Funny that this is the way people using a NETWORK client handle bugs.
I also don't really like the interface. Of course it looks cool but becomes inefficient over ssh (especially on slow connections) in my opinion because of too much redraws.

I am also not sure how stable finch really is, it also segfaulted when just running the wrapper script in pidgin-2.0.0/finch/finch after compiling. Running finch without actually installing it won't work (remember the version number of pidgin).

Since the interface of Pidgin is modular it would be nice to see additional interfaces in the future. At the moment I don't have the impression that finch is really stable and considering that Gaim^WPidgin was not famous for its security in the past (centericq also not) finch is not yet a real alternative for me.