gh chat

December 6, 2022 ยท View on GitHub

being a joke made as part of the GitHub Client Apps hackathon

somewhere on a list of "terrible ideas for the github cli" is "realtime chat." naturally adding that as a joke has always amused me, so i finally did it.

Screenshot 2022-12-02 120814

features

  • nick list
  • invites with push notification
  • join/part messages
  • visual bell on @ mention
  • ephemeral. deletes all messages on host exit.
  • figlet support
  • emoting
  • flood protection (thanks github api)
  • SMTP gateway (assuming you haven't muted email gist notifications)
  • 1337

install

gh ext install vilmibm/gh-chat

usage - create a chatroom

prior to launching the new chatroom, the room ID will be printed for copy and pasting.

gh chat

usage - join a chatroom

gh chat <chatroom ID>

a chatroom ID looks like b6f867cbdd5dcb3e08fca1323fae4db8 and you might see one in your GitHub notifications.

chat commands

  • /invite <user> invite a user to join you. they'll get a GitHub notification.
  • /me <text> do an emote
  • /banner <text> render your text as an ascii banner
  • /banner-font <font> <text> render text in the chosen font. try script or shadow for fonts.
  • /quit [<msg>] quit chat with optional departure message. you won't see this, but others in the chat will.

future direction

the extremely high tech backend for this (gist comments) has a fatal flaw--though @ mentioning someone in a gist comment does generate a notification that can be seen in web and email, gist notifications are filtered out of the API response for notifications. this means I can't programmatically check for chat invites and then interrupt someone's terminal to inform them they have a chat invite. i think this is a bug in .com and i hope we fix it.