My instant message client of choice is centerim (a fork of centericq). It does everything I need, send and receive messages in a very simple interface. Now this might sound like any ordinary client out there. But its special in that it runs completely in the terminal (ncurses based) -- and its good at it. I've tried some other terminal based clients and they all feel very cumbersome.

One major inconvenience with ncurses applications is the lack of clearly defined text areas. So copying text out is not trivial in fact its nearly impossible. So usually if I need to get text out of the application I just look in its log files. Unfortunately centerim has not-so-convenient history log format. It looks something like this:

IN
MSG
1212455295
1212455295
pong

OUT
MSG
1212455668
1212455668
pong

(each message entry is separated by "\f\ " not just "\ ")

So using a little awk magic I wrote a simple converter which parses history file into something more readable and something you can paste as a quote.

gawk -vto=anon -vfrom=me 'BEGIN {FS="\ ";RS="\f\ ";}{if (match($1,"IN")) a=to; else a=from; printf("%s %s:\t %s\ ", strftime("%H:%M:%S", $4), a, $5);for (i=6; i<=NF;i++) printf("\t\t%s\ ", $i);}' /PATH/TO/HISTORY/FILE

You need to modify the -vto and -vfrom values to correspond to your name and the name of the person you're talking to. You obviously need to also specify the path to the file. If you don't like the time stamp you can alter the string passed to strftime (man 3 strftime for format options).

Sample output of the above sample looks like this.

21:08:15 anon:   ping
21:14:28 me:     pong