Tkabber is primarily distributed in the form of two tarballs containing the code of its "core" and standard external plugins. Since Tkabber is written in an interpreted language, it does not require any "building" for a target platform. Nevertheless, Tkabber is packaged by most of known Linux distros and FreeBSD. Also special "all-in-one" packages for Microsoft Windows are provided in the forms of installer and starpack. Starpack for Linux x86 is also provided.
Tkabber implements anything found in the core specs and well-established XEPs as well as some new important facilities such as PEP. A rough list of features is:
Messaging:
* Simple one-on-one chat.
* "Normal" chat messages.
* Multi-user chat with full room administration support, invitations, history support and possibility to ignore certain users.
* "IRC-style" chat commands for room management, user info inquiry, etc.
* Chat state events.
* Nickname/keyword highlighting, stylecodes, clickable URLs, nick completion, etc.
* Chat history with searching and ability to export to XHTML.
* Support for changing the color/geometry of any aspect of the user interface.
* Support for sounds bound to certain events.
Tkabber also features a set of standard external plugins which can be installed to enhance functionality. Tkabber plugins include: Off-the-record messaging, several board games, multi-user whiteboarding, georoster, support for rendering mathematical formulae using LaTeX, Unicode character picker, chat text completions, floating transient log of new messages and more. There are also several plugins created by the Tkabber community. They aren't distributed with Tkabber but may be downloaded and installed separately. On the other hand, Tkabber currently lacks in some respects, namely:
No support for Windows XP and Vista theming engines.
No avatars in chat windows/rosters.
Multi-login works, but some parts of the UI don't know about it.
Tkabber was started by Alexey Shchepin in 2002. Several people contributed into it, notably Marshal T. Rose, Michail Litvak and Sergei Golovan, who is the current maintainer of the project. In October 2004, Alexey Shchepin won an Honorable Mention for Tkabber in the ActiveState Programmer Network's Coolest Tk Screenshot Contest. Coincidentally, another Jabber/XMPP client was a Grand Prize Winner: Mats Bengtsson for Coccinella. An extensive summary of the Tkabber's history is available here. The word "Tkabber" is built of two words: "Tk" and "Jabber" which alludes to the GUI toolkit used and the family of network protocols implemented. No one really knows how it is pronounced. Russian speakers pronounce it as .
