Facebook Messenger for geeks:
Just as you thought life at the command line couldn’t get any weirder, it’s now possible to chat to your Facebook buddies on the command line whilst you geek out on your bash scripts! Here’s how to do it
Yep, you read it correctly! If you are a command-line junkie geek by day but have ‘normal’ friends by night, that you chat to via messenger.com or via the Facebook Messenger app on your phone, you might be delighted to find out that having to stop what you are doing, bashing away at the terminal and go to your browser can be a thing of the past.
I’ve managed to dig up two Facebook Messenger CLI clients for you to have a look into. One called Messer and the other imaginatively called fb-messenger-cli.
How to install them?
Both projects are available on github only at this point, but installing them is easy. Written in JavaScript, installing fb-messenger-cli can be achieved using npm like so:
npm install -g fb-messenger-cli
Installation of messer is also nearly as trivial:
npm install -g messer
Obviously, to install either of them, they require npm, the JavaScript package manager, to be installed. If you don’t already have npm, you can do so by running sudo apt install npm. The version of npm installed afterward is shown by running npm -v. If you need a newer version of npm, then you can download it as a PPA like so:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x -o nodesource_setup.sh
sudo bash nodesource_setup.sh
sudo apt install nodejs
Further Reading
Messer github page: https://github.com/mjkaufer/Messer
fb-messenger-cli github page: https://github.com/Alex-Rose/fb-messenger-cli