Install gtmess with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• gtmess
• gtmess-notify
• gtmess_w

Project history

The official homepage credits George M. Tzoumas for 2002-2011 and describes gtmess as a console MSN Messenger client for Linux and other Unix systems including BSD, macOS, Solaris, and IRIX. The project ChangeLog records 0.8.0 as the first public release on 16 October 2003.

The ChangeLog shows the client following MSN protocol changes across MSNP8, MSNP9, and MSNP12 while adding curses UI behavior, Unicode support, logging, contact-list handling, sound and notification support, and macOS/Growl integration. The 0.97 release in December 2011 is described by the homepage as an official SourceForge release, and the 2014 news item says source code with history was uploaded to GitHub while official releases remained on SourceForge.

Adoption history

Upstream evidence supports a niche adoption story: the project maintained a SourceForge page, release tarballs, bundled documentation, and a GitHub repository, but the input package facts show only a Homebrew package-manager mapping among the sampled managers. Its use case depended on MSN Messenger service compatibility, which the homepage itself treats as uncertain by 2013.

How it is used

Users ran gtmess in a terminal, opened the F9 menu, connected with MSN credentials, selected contacts, and opened chat windows from the keyboard. The README documents a curses-style workflow with contact-list, chat-window, transfer-window, notification, editbox, and menu shortcuts.

The package also installed helper programs such as gtmess-notify and gtmess_w for notification popups and terminal launching.

Why package nerds care

gtmess is useful in package history as a fossil of protocol-specific console IM clients. It shows how early Unix users packaged proprietary-service clients around curses, pthreads, OpenSSL/certificate behavior, terminal encodings, notification helpers, and per-user logs before web and mobile clients displaced much of that workflow.

For modern package indexes, its significance is mostly archival: a buildable C/POSIX terminal client for a discontinued messaging ecosystem, with official source history preserved on GitHub and official release history on SourceForge.

Timeline

• 2002-2011: Official homepage credits project copyright to George M. Tzoumas.
• 2003-10-16: Version 0.8.0 is marked as the first public release in the ChangeLog.
• 2004-12-19: Version 0.9 adds MSNP9 support and removes MSNP7 support.
• 2006-11-07: Version 0.92 adds transparent background support, improved launcher behavior, multiline input, keep-alive, and contact-list cleanup.
• 2010-01: Version 0.96 beta work includes MSNP12 support.
• 2011-12-21: Version 0.97 is released on SourceForge.
• 2014-10-03: Official homepage announces source code with history uploaded to GitHub.

Related projects

• MSN Messenger and the MSNP protocol family define the service and protocol target.
• curses, pthreads, libnotify, Growl, OpenSSL/certificate handling, and POSIX Unix portability shape the implementation context.
• SourceForge and GitHub are the official release and source-history surfaces described by upstream.

Sources

• https://github.com/geotz/gtmess
• https://gtmess.sourceforge.net/
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geotz/gtmess/master/ChangeLog
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geotz/gtmess/master/NEWS
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geotz/gtmess/master/README