Etherpunk

I have learned that Pidgin wrote a CLI version of their software called 'Finch'.
It's neat, you can SSH in to your home and fire up your IM client and *bam* -- talk to people.
It's still VERY flakey. For example, resizing the window causes a segfault.
It also doesn't appear to look the best across Putty either.
You also need to learn controls such as ctrl+w brings up a list of windows. Unless the field is a text entry field, you have no way of knowing where you are. I've just learned to count the tabs. :-P