YTalk(1)
NAME
ytalk - A multi-user chat program.
SYNOPSIS
ytalk [-x] [-s] [-Y] [-i] username...
DESCRIPTION
YTalk V3.0 Patch Level 2
YTalk is in essence a multi-user chat program. It works
almost exactly like the UNIX talk program and even commu-
nicates with the same talk daemon(s), but YTalk allows for
multiple connections.
The username field may be formatted in several different
ways:
name - some user on your machine
name@host - some user on a different machine
name#tty - some user on a particular terminal
name#tty@host - some user on a particular tty on a
different machine
name@host#tty - same as "name#tty@host"
You can specify multiple user names on the command line,
ie:
ytalk george fred@hissun.edu marc@grumpy.cc
The -x option disables the X11 interface (described
below).
The -s option starts your YTalk window in a shell.
The -i option disables the auto-invite port (meaning you
won't see "talk to blah@blah.com", but your talk daemon
will beep you instead).
The -Y option requires a capital Y or N as an answer to
any yes/no question.
For each user on the command line, YTalk will attempt to
connect to the talk daemon on the specified user's host
and determine if that user has left an invitation for you
to call. If not, YTalk leaves an invitation for him and
tells his talk daemon to send an announcement to his
screen. There is not yet a dedicated YTalk daemon, but
there will be. Right now, YTalk is able to communicate
with BOTH existing versions of UNIX talk daemons. For any
particular host, YTalk will attempt to communicate with a
talk daemon the caller's host also supports. If the two
hosts have no daemon in common, then UNIX talk will not
function at all, but a connection is possible through (and
only through) YTalk.
Once a connection has been established between two users,
they can chat back and forth to their hearts' content.
The connection is terminated when one of them hits con-
trol-C or selects quit off the main menu.
YTalk is perfectly compatible with UNIX talk and they can
even converse with each other without any problems. How-
ever, many of the features of YTalk can only operate when
you are connected to a user who is also using YTalk. For
the rest of this document, it will be assumed that all
connected users are using YTalk, unless otherwise stated.
If you specified more than one user on the YTalk command
line, then YTalk will process and add each user to the
conversation as they respond to your invitation. As each
new user enters the conversation, the screen is further
subdivided into smaller and smaller windows, one for each
connected user. Right now, the number of connected users
is limited by the number of lines on your terminal (or
window), for each connected user needs at least three
lines.
YTalk does implement primitive support of the X11 Window-
ing System. If the environment variable DISPLAY is set,
then YTalk attempts to connect to that X server. Further
details about the X11 interface (and how to turn it off)
are given below.
As each new user is added to the conversation, YTalk will
transmit information about that user to all other con-
nected YTalk users so that their screens will also subdi-
vide and incorporate the new user. If the new user is
using UNIX talk, then information about him will NOT be
transmitted, for his screen would be unable to accept mul-
tiple connections. I have given brief thought to allowing
at least the output of UNIX talk users to be transmitted
to all connected YTalk users, but I have not written any
code to do so. Note that even though UNIX talk cannot
handle multiple connections, it is still possible for
YTalk to handle multiple UNIX "talk" connections. For
example, george (using YTalk) could communicate with fred
and joe (both using UNIX talk), but fred and joe would be
unaware of each other. The best way to understand the
limitations that UNIX "talk" places on YTalk is to test
various connections between the two and see how things
work.
ESCAPE MENU
Whenever you are using YTalk, you can hit the ESCAPE key
to bring up a menu which at this moment has these options:
a: add a user
d: delete a user
k: kill all unconnected
o: options
s: shell
u: user list
w: output user to file
q: quit
By choosing option "a", you are given the opportunity to
type the name of any user you wish to include into the
conversation. Again, YTalk will accept an invitation from
that user if an invitation exists, or will leave an invi-
tation and ring the given user.
By choosing option "d", you can select the name of a con-
nection to terminate.
By choosing option "k", you can make YTalk forget all
pending (waiting) connections.
By choosing option "o", you can view and/or modify any of
the YTalk options. See the OPTIONS section below for a
list of YTalk options.
By choosing option "s", you can invoke a shell in your
YTalk window. All other users will see what happens in
your shell. YTalk will automatically resize your window
down to the size of the smallest window you are connected
to, in order to ensure that all users always see the same
thing.
The "u" option displays a list of connected and uncon-
nected users, as well as their window sizes and what ver-
sion of talk software they are running.
By choosing option "w", you can select any connected user
and type the name of a file, and all further output from
that user will be dumped to the specified file. The file,
if it exists, will be OVERWRITTEN. By choosing "w" and
the same user again, further output to the file will be
terminated.
Oh, one other thing: when user A attempts to ytalk to
user B, but user B is already ytalking with user C, user
A's YTalk program will realize that user B is already
using YTalk, and will communicate with user B's YTalk pro-
gram directly in order to initialize the conversation.
User B will see a nice windowed message like:
Do you wish to talk with user A?
and he will be prompted for a yes/no answer. This, in my
opinion, is much preferable to blitting the announcement
message and messing up user B's screen. The command-line
option "-i" turns this off.
RUNTIME OPTIONS
When you select Options off of the main menu, you are
given the opportunity to edit the YTalk options. The cur-
rent options are:
s: turn scrolling [off/on]
w: turn word-wrap [off/on]
i: turn auto-import [off/on]
v: turn auto-invite [off/on]
r: turn auto-rering [off/on]
a: turn asides [off/on]
If scrolling is turned on, then a user's window will
scroll when he reaches the bottom, instead of wrapping
back around to the top.
If word-wrap is turned on, then any word which would
overextend the right margin will be automatically moved to
the next line on your screen.
If auto-import is turned on, then YTalk will assume that
you wish to talk to any users which connect to other YTalk
users which are connected to you. That last sentence does
make sense; try again. YTalk will add these users to your
session automatically, without asking you for verifica-
tion.
If auto-invite is turned on, then YTalk will automatically
accept any connection requested by another user and add
them to your session. You will not be asked for verifica-
tion.
If auto-rering is turned on, then YTalk will automatically
re-ring any user who does not respond to your invitation
within 30 seconds. You will not be asked for verifica-
tion.
If asides is turned on (it may not be available), then
keyboard input received while the input focus is in a spe-
cific users' window will only be sent to that user. See
the X11 interface description below.
Any of these options can be set to your preference in your
.ytalkrc file, as described below.
YTALK STARTUP FILE
If your home directory contains a file named ".ytalkrc"
then YTalk will read this file while starting up. All
YTalk runtime options, as well as some startup options,
can be set in this file.
SETTING BOOLEAN OPTIONS
Boolean options can be pre-set with the following syntax:
turn option [off | on]
where option is one of scrolling , word-wrap , auto-import
, auto-invite , auto-rering , caps , noinvite , nodelay ,
asides , or X . Setting these options works just like
described above. Turning X on or off will enable or dis-
able the X11 Interface described below. For example, one
could enable word-wrap with the line:
turn word-wrap on
SETTING RE-ADDRESS MODES
The purpose of readdressing is to allow Ytalk connections
across point-to-point network gateways where the local
machines know themselves by a different address (and typi-
cally hostname) than the remote machines. The basic syn-
tax of a readdress command is this:
readdress from-address to-address domain
The readdress statement simply makes a claim that the
machine(s) in domain communicate with the machine(s) at
from-address by sending a packet to to-address . Since
most users have no use for this whatsoever, I'll describe
it only briefly.
THIS IS NOT ROUTING. For example, my machine at home is
connected via PPP to the network at my office. My machine
at home thinks its ethernet address is 192.188.253.1 and
its hostname is "talisman.com". The network at my office
has the address 192.67.141.0. When I'm connected via PPP,
my home machine is placed into the office network as
address 192.67.141.9 with hostname "talis-
man.austin.eds.com".
YTalk needs to know that if it is running on domain
192.67.141.0 and receives packets from 192.188.253.1 that
it should respond to 192.67.141.9, not 192.188.253.1.
right? right. okay, okay, okay. I put this line into my
.ytalkrc on both ends:
readdress talisman talisman.austin.eds.com
192.67.141.0
On my home end, this translates to:
readdress 192.188.253.1 192.67.141.9 192.67.141.0
which tells my home machine to advertise itself as
"192.67.141.9" instead of "192.188.253.1" when YTalk-ing
to machines on the network "192.67.141.0". On the office
end, the readdress command translates to:
readdress 192.67.141.9 192.67.141.9 192.67.141.0
which the office machines basically ignore.
Enough. For more information on how to use this, consult
the source code or send me a letter. :-)
X11 INTERFACE
If the DISPLAY environment variable is defined when YTalk
starts up, then YTalk will attempt to communicate with
that X server. A window will be created for you and each
user you are connected to. The X11 Interface can be dis-
abled either by specifying -x on the command line or by
putting this line into your .ytalkrc file:
turn X off
A window is created for each individual user in the con-
versation. If the input focus is in the main window (ie:
the one with "ytalk" in the title bar) then anything typed
will be sent to all connected users. If the input focus
is in one of the users' windows, then anything typed will
be sent as an aside to only that user. If the "aside"
option is turned off (see above) then ytalk will beep and
not accept anything typed when the input focus is not in
the main window.
YTalk consults the X11 Resource Database for these user-
definable configuration options:
YTalk.display: X server to connect to, defaulting to
the DISPLAY environment variable.
YTalk.reverse: reverse black/white pixels.
YTalk.font: font to use, defaulting to "9x15".
YTalk.geometry: window size, defaulting to "80x24".
FUTURE WORK
Work is being done on the following ideas:
1) a dedicated YTalk daemon.
2) MBCS/NLS support.
FILES
/usr/local/etc/ytalkrc
System-wide defaults file.
$HOME/.ytalkrc
User's local configuration file. This file overrides
options set in the system ytalkrc file.
AUTHOR
Britt Yenne
yenne@austin.eds.com
This version maintained by
lt;roger.espel.llima@pobox.com
CONTRIBUTORS
Special thanks to Carl Edman for numerous code patches,
beta testing, and comments. I think this guy spends as
much time on ytalk as I do.
Special thanks to Tobias Hahn and Geoff W. for beta test-
ing and suggestions.
Thanks to Sitaram Ramaswamy for the original YTalk man-
page.
Thanks to Magnus Hammerin for Solaris 2.* support.
Thanks to Thilo Wunderlich for Linux support.
Thanks to Jonas Yngvesson for aside messages in X.
Thanks to Andreas Stolcke for fixing the X resource
database calls.
Thanks to Pete Wenzel for fixing the #elif directive.
Thanks to John Vanderpool, Shih-Chen Huang, Andrew Myers,
Duncan Sinclair, Evan McLean, Larry Schwimmer, J. Adam
Hawkes, and Mark Musone for comments and ideas.
The README file shipped with ytalk gives detailed attribu-
tions.
BUGS
Hostnames of new connections passed to other connected
parties are sometimes missing the domain part.
Please mail any other bugs to the maintainer of this ver-
sion, at lt;roger.espel.llima@pobox.com