My workflow nowadays involves a lot of time at the shell. I've recently become a disciple of Unix as an IDE, so over time I've replaced my GUI-based dev tools with their shell-based counterparts. Sublime Text with vintage mode was quickly dumped for Vim and a few plugins. Tabs in gnome-terminal were replaced with tmux (and somewhere, a choir of angels burst into song) hosting tons of ssh or psql connections. If I don't need to look anything up online, I can work for at least a couple of hours before coming up for air at the desktop.
So naturally I started thinking about a shell-based replacement for chat. My go-to solution has always been Pidgin for its simplicity, plugins, and OTR (Off The Record) encryption support. I strictly use gtalk, so the client wouldn't need to