I was fully ready to dunk on it; of course it’s never just 5 lines, of course it sucks etc. Hurr Durr import chat-application is 1 line in python

Well yeah nothing is 5 lines unless you’re writing 5 lines of assembly for a start, but they also acknowledge that it doesn’t really matter and also they lied about the count.

All the fundamentals are fantastic. Of course it heavily leverages unix and generally default tools on gnu systems, but this is tried and tested. If there is an exploit that breaks this, you have bigger fish to fry. The only problem I have is that nobody I ever talk to would ever want to ssh to a server to have a chat using this, and especially not outside of the novelty factor. This makes me sad but clearly it isn’t the creator’s fault.

A point they never touch on: the fact this is ultimately just a shell program that uses stain/stdout means you can also interact with it remotely through echo “something” | ssh user@server “suc channel”. Interesting use case that doesn’t require you install it everywhere.