bitchat-cli

Serverless, peer-to-peer chat over a Bluetooth LE mesh — right in your terminal.

Wire-compatible with the bitchat app for public chat: exchange text, images, voice notes, and files one hop with a real bitchat phone in range.

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✨ Features

• 🛰️ Serverless & decentralized — no internet, accounts, or servers. Just Bluetooth.
• 📡 Talks to the real app — interoperates with bitchat on iOS/Android for public/broadcast chat.
• 🖼️ Media support — send and receive images, voice notes, and files (/send <path>); received media is saved to ~/.bitchat/downloads/ and opened automatically.
• 🔐 Signed messages — every packet is Ed25519-signed, matching the format the app requires.
• 🎨 Themed terminal UI — timestamps, a stable color per peer, and clear status glyphs. Honors NO_COLOR.
• 🐍 Pure Python — built on bleak, runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

📦 Installation

Requires Python 3.8+ and a working Bluetooth LE adapter.

From PyPI (recommended):

pip install bitchat-cli

From source:

git clone https://github.com/dearabhin/bitchat-cli.git
cd bitchat-cli
pip install -e .

🚀 Usage

Once installed, launch it from anywhere:

bitchat          # or: bitchat-cli

From a source checkout you can also run python -m bitchat_cli.

It immediately starts scanning for nearby bitchat peers, connects to any in range, and broadcasts whatever you type. Type a message and press Enter to send it publicly.

💬 Commands

Command	Description
<message>	Any text not starting with / is broadcast publicly to peers.
/send <path>	Send an image, voice note, or file to peers (alias: /file).
/w	List known peers (peer ID → nickname).
/name <nickname>	Change your nickname and re-announce.
/clear	Clear the screen.
/help	Show the list of available commands.

🔧 How it works

bitchat-cli uses bleak as a BLE central that discovers, connects to, and exchanges packets with real bitchat peers in range. It implements bitchat's binary wire protocol — announce / leave / public-message / file-transfer packets, PKCS#7 padding, fragment reassembly, and Ed25519 packet signing — so it can take part in public chat with the official app.

Note

Scope & limitations. Only public/broadcast chat is supported. Private (Noise-encrypted) messaging, multi-hop mesh relaying, and advertising as a BLE peripheral are not implemented — bleak is central-only, so this client works one hop with peers it is connected to and is not itself discoverable when idle.

🧪 Protocol self-test

Verify the wire-protocol implementation without any Bluetooth hardware (needs only cryptography):

python selftest.py

Run it from a source checkout — it imports the bitchat_cli package and covers packet encode/decode, signatures, fragmentation, and the media file format.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

1. Fork the repository and clone your fork.
2. Install in editable mode: pip install -e .
3. Create a branch, make your change, and run python selftest.py.
4. Open a Pull Request with a clear description.

🙌 Credits

An independent Python port of bitchat — the serverless BLE-mesh chat app. All the wire-format credit belongs to the upstream project; this CLI just speaks its language.

📄 License

Released under the GNU GPL-3.0.