So, we use XMPP for our internal chat system at work, but I hate pidgin and empathy’s not much better. Naturally I searched for command line alternatives and the least offensive one I could find was finch, which admittedly uses libpurple on the backend, so it’s really pidgin, but at least it’s in a terminal now. Of course, I lost all my notifications of incoming messages, which isn’t cool, so I cooked up a simple script and call it instead of playing sound through finch. In finch’s “sounds” menu, simply change “Automatic” to “command”. In ubuntu, you’ll need two new packages:
sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin mplayer
And you’ll need this script, and to remember the path to it:
#!/bin/bash
latest_line=`find ~/.purple/logs/jabber/ -mtime -1 -printf "%T@ %Tx %TX %p\n" | sort -n -r | head | cut -d ' ' -f 2- | awk '{print $NF}' | head -1 | xargs tail -1 | sed -e 's#<[^>]*>##g'`
mplayer $1 >/dev/null 2>&1 &
notify-send "`echo $latest_line | cut -d ':' -f 3 | awk -F ')' '{print $2}'`" "`echo $latest_line | cut -d ':' -f 4-`"