Centericq

CenterICQ

File:Centericq-006.gif IRC chat window
Developer(s)	Konstantin Klyagin
Initial release	1 August 1999
Written in	C++
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	bg, cs, de, en, es, fr, hu, it, ms, nl, pl, pt, ro, ru, sv, uk, zh
Type	Instant messaging client
License	GPL
Website	Centericq

CenterICQ is a text mode menu- and window-driven instant messaging interface that supports the ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, XMPP, LiveJournal, and Gadu-Gadu protocols. It allows you to send, receive, and forward messages, URLs, SMSes (both through the ICQ server and email gateways supported by Mirabilis), contacts, and email express messages, and it has many other useful features. Known to work in Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X/Darwin Operating Systems.

Its heyday was in the first half-decade of the 2000s, with reviews appearing in Softpedia, and Czech online magazines ABC Linux and Linux.cz. It was also recommended in a 2004 OSNews article on console applications, and in a similar article in the Russian magazine Computerra. Two tutorial articles appeared in the German magazine LinuxUser in 2001 and 2004; the latter article also appeared in the English version of Linux Magazine. It was included in a 2002 round-up of ICQ clients in the Russian XAKER magazine, and in a 2005 round-up review of IRC Clients in Free Software Magazine. The FSM reviewer remarked CenterICQ for its windows-like interface built on top of the usual curses library, which provides a lot of information, but can also look cluttered on smaller terminal windows, including the standard 80 by 25 terminal. It also found that IRC support was "excellent" due to support for multiple servers and channels and the ease of switching between them in the “windowed” interface. In September 2002, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols found it "the greatest of all console IM clients" due to its "excellent interface and a huge number of features and configuration options" in a category review on Freshmeat. In 2005 it was also reviewed in The Unofficial Apple Weblog, but despite support for .mac accounts, the reviewer was displeased with the "annoying key combos" required to access the menus, because on OS X the usual function key assignments of CenterICQ could not be used. He could also not access the MSN network. Despite this he concluded: "All things considered, I've decided that Centericq is the most stable and intuitive terminal based chat client."

In November 2007, the project's website stated that CenterICQ is dead.^{[citation needed]} Because CenterICQ is not actively maintained anymore, other developers forked the project to CenterIM, and applied several security patches and updates. As of 2009, CenterIM is still in development; version 4.22.9 was released on December 14. Neither CenterICQ nor CenterIM 4 support Unicode, but support for UTF-8 is planned for CenterIM 5.

See also

• naim is another text-based messaging client with support for multiple protocols
• List of XMPP client software
• Comparison of instant messaging clients

Further reading

• Alexandru Voiculescu (Sepember 2002) Interview with Konstantin Klyagin, PC Magazine Romania, original in Romanian
• Petr Krčmář (12 March 2007), Interview with the CenterICQ author, Konstantin Klyagin, root.cz

External links

• The Official Centericq website
• CenterIM - CenterICQ fork