atTalk - Encrypted chat client

Let's chat!

For the final example we have at_talk, which is a fully end-to-end encrypted chat application in less than 300 lines of code. There is nothing pretty; it's just a command line app that takes the Unix/Linux command talk to a global level.

The command talk allows people on a Unix/Linux machine to IM each other, at_talk allows anyone with an Atsign to talk with each other.

This code is in a separate repo, so, once again, in VS Code click the "Clone Git Repository" button. Then enter:

https://github.com/atsign-foundation/at_talk.git

Like before, you will get asked if you want to run pub get and should say yes, or, if you prefer, you can open a terminal window and type:

 dart pub get

This, as we know, pulls in the needed libraries and the code will lose all the red underlines as those libraries are loaded.

At this point, we can open two terminal panels, as we have done before, and run the at_talk code. You can run at_talk without any arguments and it will return some help:

dart run .\bin\at_talk.dart
-k, --key-file                Your atSign's atKeys file if not in ~/.atsign/keys/
-a, --atsign (mandatory)      Your atSign
-t, --toatsign (mandatory)    Talk to this atSign
-d, --root-domain             Root Domain (defaults to root.atsign.org)
-n, --namespace               Namespace (defaults to ai6bh)
-v, --verbose                 More logging
    --never-sync              Completely disable sync
Invalid argument(s): Option atsign is mandatory.

From here, you can split windows like before and run two at_talk applications and send messages to each other.

In the left window, for example (subsitute your own Atsigns!

 dart run .\bin\at_talk.dart -a "@7capricorn" -t "@energetic22" -n "atsign"

In the right window, the same, but in reverse.

 dart run .\bin\at_talk.dart -a "@energetic22" -t "@7capricorn" -n "atsign"

In this session, you can see the typed messages in white and the received messages in green with the prompts in red.

talking atSigns

Unlike Linux talk, however, these two Atsigns can be anywhere on the Internet and communicating with Privacy. Get a friend to run through the demo and use at_talk !

There are a couple of features that are worth mentioning: You can use the / and then an Atsign to change who you are sending messages to, and, yes, you can message to yourself.

The other feature that has proved very useful is being able to "pipe" commands to at_talk. To do this, compile the code to a binary using:

dart compile exe -o attalk bin/at_talk.dart

Now you can "pipe" the output of a command into the chat with the other Atsign.

cat .\bin\at_talk.dart| attalk -a "@energetic22" -t "@7capricorn" -n "atsign"

This prints the code of at_talk.dart into the receiving Atsign's chat window. To our knowledge, this is the only chat application that you can pipe things to!

If you go this far, first, thank you, and second, please enjoy your continuing journey and raise issues and PRs to any of the repos!