termchat

+--------------+--------------------------------------+
|  CHANNELS    |  #general                            |
|  > # general |  [12:00:01] alice: hello everyone    |
|    # random  |  [12:00:12] bob:   hi alice          |
|    # help    |                                      |
|              |                                      |
|  ONLINE (2)  |                                      |
|  * alice     |                                      |
|  * bob       +--------------------------------------+
|              |  > type a message and press Enter    |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+

What it does

Accounts. Register and log in; passwords are hashed with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 and a per-user salt. One account, one session at a time.
Channels. Ships with #general, #random and #help; create more on the fly.
Real time. Messages broadcast instantly to everyone in the channel, the online list updates live, and dropped connections are cleaned up for everyone else.
History. Everything is persisted in SQLite; the last 50 messages load when you open a channel.

Three clients, one server

Terminal UI built on rich: channel sidebar, online users, per-user colours, keyboard navigation. Needs a Linux/macOS terminal.
Desktop GUI in Tkinter. It can host the server itself and packages into a standalone TermChat.exe for Windows, with no Python needed on the target.
Browser client, a mobile-friendly web UI served by the same server over HTTP/WebSocket — a fourth transport into the same channels, not a separate chat.

How it’s built

Clients talk to a threaded server (one thread per connection, shared state behind a lock) over TCP using 4-byte length-prefixed JSON frames. The WebSocket handshake and framing (RFC 6455) are implemented on the standard library, so the only third-party dependency is rich, and only for the terminal client.

Component	File
Wire protocol	`termchat/protocol.py`
Database	`termchat/database.py`
Server	`termchat/server.py`
TUI client	`termchat/client.py`
GUI client	`termchat/gui.py`
WebSocket framing	`termchat/ws.py`
Browser client	`termchat/web.py`

Running it

git clone https://github.com/M0rPh39s/termchat.git && cd termchat
pip install -r requirements.txt

python run_server.py --host 0.0.0.0 --port 9009 --web-port 8080
python run_client.py --host 127.0.0.1 --port 9009   # or: python run_gui.py

Traffic is plain TCP / HTTP — put it behind a TLS reverse proxy before exposing it to an untrusted network.