Tkabber is developed in Tcl/Tk, works on many platforms and it has been tested on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and Windows 98/2000/XP.

Tkabber provides a Tcl/Tk interface to the Jabber/XMPP instant messaging and presence service.

Tcl/Tk is a graphical scripting language that runs on the Unix, Windows, and Macintosh platforms. The choice of Tcl/Tk for a Jabber client is three-fold:
· it is portable: once you install a Tcl/Tk interpreter on your system, the Tkabber script "just runs" — without having to compile anything;
· it is customizable: Tkabber reads a configuration file when it starts that tells it the settings of various parameters; and,
· it is extensible: the configuration file is actually a Tcl script, so you can replace or augment entire portions of Tkabber (if you're so inclined).

Here are some key features of "Tkabber":

Sessions:
· TCP and HTTP-polling session transports
· XMPP SRV and TXT DNS-records handling
· hashed passwords
· SASL authentication
· encrypted sessions (if you install an optional extension)
· compressed sessions (if you install an optional extension)
· login via SOCKS4a, SOCKS5 or HTTPS proxy
· user-defined hooks for connection establishment and release
· XMPP/Jabber MIME type

Messages:
· privacy rules
· signed/encrypted messages (if you install an optional extension)
· file transfers (HTTP, SOCKS bytestream, DTCP and IBB transports)
· groupchat (GroupChat-1.0 and Multi-User Chat conferencing protocols)
· headline messages
· message events
· completions of nick and commands
· hyperlinks
· emoticons
· user-defined hooks for chat window events

Presence:
· signed presence (if you install an optional extension)
· avatars
· browsing
· groupchat and roster invitations
· conference room bookmarks
· annotations about roster items
· vCards
· user-defined hooks for presence changes

Windowing:
· configurable look-and-feel via a resources database
· unicode
· tabbed/non-tabbed interface
· sound notifications
· nested roster groups
· for Unix: auto-away, spell checking, KDE or freedesktop docking, and WMaker icons
· for Windows: auto-away, and taskbar icons

Requirements:

· Tcl/Tk version 8.3.3 (or later, Tcl/Tk 8.4.9 or later is recommended)
· tcllib version 1.2 (or later, tcllib 1.8 or later is required for SRV and TXT DNS-records support).
· BWidget 1.3 (or later)

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· New default sound theme by Serge Yudin
· Added new plugins: quotelastmsg, singularity, stripes
· Many fixes and enhancements