Show HN: type to me, old-school unix talk for the web

by dmd • 15 years ago

43 18 15 years ago

dmd4• 15 years ago

We've created a simple two-person character-at-a-time talk utility modeled after old-school unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' (or, if you like, VMS PHONE).

As far as we're aware, this is the ONLY existing implementation of character-at-at-time chat available anywhere on the web; we looked pretty hard and couldn't find any, so we wrote this to scratch our own itch. (The best we'd come up with prior to this was a shared etherpad doc.)

We would love help (a) making sure this scales to high loads and even more crucially (b) getting it to work under IE8.

koopajah2• 15 years ago

That seems fun! I remember loving this kind of chat 10 years ago when using ICQ. But on my side it seems buggy. If I connect to myself, one in Firefox and one in chrome (under linux) only the chrome one is "connected" not the firefox part. If i try with a friend under chrome and me under firefox, I see him type but he does not see anything!

Possibility to erase what was typed before could be fun too.

EDIT: tried again and my friend has a message asking him to give me the same URL I gave him but we are not connected together.

dmd4• 15 years ago

I've seen this a few times, and refreshing always fixed it... unless your friend is on Firefox 3, which we don't support.

a3_nm• 15 years ago

> As far as we're aware, this is the ONLY existing implementation of character-at-at-time chat available anywhere on the web

You can do it with Google Wave. It's not the intended use, but it's less awkward than a shared Etherpad.

osswid• 15 years ago

http://telehack.com/ has a 'talk' command and a web interface, although you'll have to make an account to use it and CLI your way to the command.

The simple web interface at typeto.me is pretty slick.

medium• 15 years ago

INSTANTLY crashes Safari 5.0.5 on OSX 10.6.8 works great in Chrome 7.0.517.41 on OSX 10.6.8

Been using it for 20 minutes, works great, and I love seeing the typing/mistakes correction.. Parsing links would be helpful.

OK, now friend says I was disconnected ("User Disconnected") on his end and there was no message for me on my end.

Can reload page and it resumes same chat, without previous chat but same user.

dmd4• 15 years ago

Unfortunately I don't have access to that particular configuration; if you or anyone else has any ideas as to why it crashes we'd love to hear them here or over at the Github page!

lysol2• 15 years ago

Link parsing is coming. It's even on our issues page! Thanks for the feedback.

randomdata• 15 years ago

Interestingly, it works fine on 5.0.5 on 10.6.7.

lysol2• 15 years ago

To add to dmd's goals, I'd like to also package up the code socket.io-style, so character-level updates can be utilized for other types of applications. The frontend uses Google's diff_match_patch library (http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/), which is serving pretty well so far.

piranha2• 15 years ago

Do you take feature requests? If yes, then I would like to have:

- ability to have multi-user chat (side-by-side rather then one under another) - ability to remove arbitrary symbols - ability to highlight (when you select some text, it's displayed as highlighted on the other side).

I hope I'm not asking too much. :) And, anyway - thanks! I've been thinking about writing my own, but was too lazy to experiment with it.

apgwoz• 15 years ago

I think you're missing the point. This implements some nostalgic feature of Unix. http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/talk/

piranha2• 15 years ago

I know what it implements, but it could be much more. :P There were few different implementations of talk which had mentioned improvements (not all of them in the same time though).

tlack• 15 years ago

Works great and looks brilliantly simple.

Old timer story: reminds me of the old MajorBBS direct /chat mode. At the time, the chaotic neutral people would "moof" the other person by sending a bunch of invisible characters (^H back then) and disconnecting the remote user as the FIFO buffer filled. I wonder if such a thing would be possible with the socket-like interface used here and in other apps.

chromium• 15 years ago

I'm curious, where were you able to host this?

The interface looks fantastic, the simplicity is the killer feature.

dmerfield• 15 years ago

Ascii dick.

Show HN: type to me, old-school unix talk for the web

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