Programming

Hey guys,

This is quite simply what I'm trying to make:

A program that runs in a UNIX terminal that you can output text messages to from another machine. These text messages would be prepended with a customized prompt. I'd also like to have the window spew out random dumps of flavor text not necessarily sent from another machine, but generated by the output window's program itself.

What I had in mind was perhaps have two parts to this program- an input script and an output script. The messages are sent through the input script's window and displayed through the output script's window on another machine. My biggest issues are 1) getting them to connect and communicate over the network, and 2) generating the text output.

I'm not sure how to go about doing part 1, and that's why I am considering modifying existing code from an existing UNIX chat client. As for part 2, I think I can just put all of the flavor text into output script's program, and have loops that would display the text in random amounts of time.

So does anyone have any recommendations on this?

Could I just re-skin a preexisting chat client to have the image look all 1980s Matrix code-like, and allow me to change the prompts of the output (example- MilCom@Farfield <timestamp>: Here are the new orders blah blah)? If so, does anyone have any suggestions for which client I should customize?

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Take a look at mesg, talk and write.