ncdc -- an ncurses discord client

Description

ncdc is a command line, ncurses based discord client, similar to how cmus is a ncurses music viewer. In fact, both cmus and irssi were huge inspirations for this project.

Requirements

There are no binary packages of yet, so you will have to make due with compiling it yourself. You will need the following libraries, and their development files (depending on your distribution):

• gcc
• make
• cmake
• libcurl
• libglib2
• libconfuse
• libjansson
• libevent2
• libncursesw
• libpanel

Building & Installing

Use cmake to build and install ncdc:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

This will build, and install ncdc into your /usr/bin for your using pleasure.

Configuration

The configuration file of ncdc lies within $HOME/.config/ncdc and is called config. There is not much there yet, except it allows you to specify an account to login with:

account "someaccount" {
    email = "somewhere@example.com"
    password = "YourPasswordInPlainText"
}

Since the password is there in plain text it never hurts to make sure that the file has proper permissions.

Using

There are three input panes in the view. To the left is guild overview, showing you all of your guilds, and their channels. To the right is the current text view showing you the contents of the text clients you have open. At the bottom is the command input line, allowing you to set off commands.

The text view has one standard text view channel called "status" in which ncdc will print errors, informational messages (such as friends lists), and perhaps the odd event that has occoured.

Hot keys

Hotkey	Function	Usable in view
F1	switch to input	globally
F2	switch to guild view	globally
F3	switch to chat view	globally
ALT+LEFT	previous text view	globally
ALT+RIGHT	next text view	globally
LEFT	collapse tree item	guilds
RIGHT	expand tree item	guilds
UP	previous tree item	guilds
DOWN	next tree item	guilds
ENTER	open selected channel	guilds
LEFT, RIGHT	move cursor	input
C-w	kill word left	input
C-u	kill all left	input
C-k	kill all right	input
C-b	cursor backwards	input
C-f	cursor forwards	input
C-d	delete at position	input
BACKSPACE	delete backwards	input

Commands

These commands can be issued in the input line, and allow you to interface with ncdc more easily. You can quote arguments with a double quote " in case an argument for a command contains spaces, or special characters. If you don't start your line with a forward slash / then the text is seen as a chat line, and sent to the appropriate channel. Arguments, such as guild names, or user names are all case sensitive.

Command	Function	Arguments	Notes
/ack	Mark channel as read		WIP
/close	Close current channel view
/connect	Connect as the given account	account, as named in config
/dnd	Mark yourself as do not disturb
/friend	List all friends
/friend accept	Accept a friend request	full discord name, i.e. name#XXXX
/friend add	Add a friend	full discord name, i.e. name#XXXX
/friend list	List all friends
/friend remove	Remove a friend	full discord name, i.e. name#XXXX
/friends	Alias for "/friend"
/idle	Mark yourself as idle
/invisible	Mark yourself as invisible
/join	Join a guild channel	"guild name" "channel name"
/login	Alias for /connect
/logout	Log current user out
/markread	Alias for /ack		WIP
/msg	Private message a friend	full discord name, i.e. name#XXXX
/online	Mark yourself as online
/post	Post a message to current channel	full message to post
/quit	Exit, and quit
/wc	Alias for /close

Work In Progress

This client is very much work in progress, and lacks a lot of features. Here are a few that would be nice to have:

• auto completion
• man pages
• notification handling if guilds are edited
• /markread support
• handling for markdown, i.e. bold, italics, colours etc.
• voice chat support
• better performing websocket implementation

Hacking

The code is written in C, and in C only. Use four spaces, no tabs. No tabs. and indent according to K&R C. Use ref counting wherever possible, and put on a condom when handling pointers. No tabs. Use the glib over rolling your own arrays, hash tables, or other data structures. Use stdint over glib basic types, if absolute necessary. Stick to standard types (i.e. int) if the size doesn't matter.

Stick pure discord functionality in libdc (libdiscord), such as JSON parsing, web socket action, API calls, among others. libdc uses single byte strings (i.e. UTF-8). Put all UI stuff into ncdc (ncurses discord client), and use wchar_t there for displaying purposes, along with the wide character functions of ncurses.

You can valgrind the application like so:

valgrind --log-file=valgrind.log --leak-check=full --undef-value-errors=no ./ncdc/ncdc

And you should debug the ncurses application by attaching to it from another terminal:

$ gdb --pid=$(pidof ncdc)

Happy Hacking!