Used as a final project for CS3520 @ NU

Note to Northeastern students: At present, Talk is unable to connect to users that are connected to NUWave. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Talk is an encrypted, peer-to-peer messaging client for the C Tox library. Talk works by connecting users via their Tox ID, allowing for seamless, encrypted, one-on-one messaging. Talk also leverages curses to create a terminal UI.

By default, no data in Talk persists after the program is closed, unless the user issues the save command. This can be changed by setting the AUTOSAVE flag in main to true.

After installing the necessary dependencies, use the provided CMakeLists.txt to build with CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Alternatively, build on Linux with g++:

g++ -std=c++17 lib/include/* main.cpp -lpthread -lsodium -ltoxcore -lcurses -o talk

Finally, run the executable talk:

./talk

Talk has a set of commands, that allow the user to perform various functions of the Tox API. The user's current input can be seen at the bottom of the screen, after the > marker.

To get started, users should first make note of their Tox ID, which is displayed on startup, in yellow. Users can change their name with setname to change their username from the default anon.

This can be used with the add command by a different user to send a friend request.

After a one user adds another, the other user can see the request with requests and accept it with accept <request-id>, replacing <request-id> with the appropriate ID shown in requests.

Finally, after both users see that their new friend is online, they can begin a conversation with talk.

start provides the user with a quick start guide to get up-and-running using Talk. This command takes no arguments.

help displays all available commands, with a short description. This command can be used with no arguments, or with the name of a command to get just that command's description.

myid displays a user's Tox ID, which can be passed by another user as the first argument to add to send a friend request. This command takes no arguments.

add is used to send friend requests to a friend via their Tox ID.

Usage:

add <tox-ID> <optional-request-message>

delete is used to delete a friend from a user's friends list via the friend's friend number. Friend numbers can be seen using phonebook.

Usage:

delete <friend-num>

info will display information about a friend, specified by friend number. If given no arguments, it will display info about the user.

Usage:

info <friend-num>

history will display all messages sent between a user and a friend, specified by friend number. Note: currently, chat history is lost after a Talk session is finished.

Usage:

history <friend-num>

setname will change the display name of the user.

Usage:

setname <new-name>

setstatus will change the status message of the user.

Usage:

setstatus <new-status>

phonebook will display a list of all current friends of the user. This command takes no arguments.

requests displays a list of all pending friend requests sent to the user. They can be accepted or denied using accept and deny, respectively. This command takes no arguments.

accept will accept a pending friend request, given the request ID. All pending requests and their IDs can be seen with requests.

Usage:

accept <request-id>

deny will deny a pending friend request, given the request ID. All pending requests and their IDs can be seen with requests.

Usage:

deny <request-id>

talk will begin a conversation with a friend, given their friend number. Using talk changes the input mode from command mode to chat mode, which means that all inputs from the user are read as messages, not commands. To leave a conversation and return to command mode, enter /leave. All friends and their friend numbers can be seen with phonebook.

Usage:

talk <friend-num>

save will save a user's current name, status, friends, and requests to a save file. By default, this file is ./savedata.tox, and is in the same directory as the executable. This command takes no arguments.

exit will safely end this Talk session. This command takes no arguments.

For this program to work, install Tox (toxcore), and all of its dependencies, most notably sodium.

This can be done with most package managers (toxcore and sodium have packages available on apt, brew, etc.), or by locally building and installing (Tox and [sodium]](https://doc.libsodium.org/installation))

For UI, also make sure you have ncurses installed (comes preinstalled on most *nix machines).