I’m pretty sure I used one that was terminal based, likely using ncurses. Without searching, I can’t recall the name of it, though.
I used XMPP a bit among friends, more so when Google supported it, which was probably after ICQ/AIM/MSN wasn’t as popular? I don’t really talk to many people anymore, so whatever, heheh :)
It would be nice to see XMPP make some kind of “comeback” … or some sort of popularity boost like mastodon/lemmy/etc in recent times.
I might have almost destroyed a monitor with bad XFree86 timings on Slackware once or twice. Pulled the plug on that thing pretty fast.