WA-TUI

Contribution

What I built

1. 01Built a full chat client in the terminal: paged chat list with all / direct / group filters, unread-only toggle, three sort orders, quoted replies, media downloads and five colour palettes persisted to ~/.wa-tui.
2. 02Wrote the fuzzy finder (Ctrl+K or /): every query term must match as a substring, with higher scores at the start of a field, on word boundaries and for longer terms — across chats and the open thread at once.
3. 03Made presence real in both directions: outgoing typing is debounced to one pulse per 480 ms burst, peer typing and voice-recording states are read through a bridge injected into the WhatsApp Web page, and rows show ✓ / ✓✓ / read.
4. 04Handled first run properly: WA-TUI installs its own Chromium with a progress bar on the boot screen, prunes stale cache folders first, and keeps the session so you pair once.
5. 05Shipped three ways — a Homebrew tap, `npm i -g @gtchakama/wa-tui` and `npx` — with GitHub Actions running the Node 18 / 20 test matrix and cutting a release on every version bump.

How it works

How the data moves

The core paths through the system — a dot travels each hop, and the caption says what happens there.

From the code

A few lines that matter

function fuzzyMatchScore(query, text) {
  const parts = searchQueryParts(query);
  if (!parts.length) return 0;
  const haystack = String(text || '').toLowerCase();
  let score = 0;
  for (const part of parts) {
    const idx = haystack.indexOf(part);
    if (idx === -1) return -1; // all parts must be substrings
    // Prefer matches at the start or at word boundaries
    if (idx === 0) score += 20;
    else if (' -_./:@'.includes(haystack[idx - 1] || '')) score += 10;
    score += Math.max(0, 10 - idx); // earlier matches score higher
    score += part.length;           // longer matching parts score higher
  }
  return score;
}

const OUTGOING_TYPING_DEBOUNCE_MS = 480;

function scheduleOutgoingTypingPulse() {
  if (state.screen !== 'chatDetail' || !state.currentChatId) return;
  clearTimeout(outgoingTypingTimer);
  outgoingTypingTimer = setTimeout(() => {
    outgoingTypingTimer = null;
    void waService.pulseOutgoingTyping(state.currentChatId, state.currentRawChat);
  }, OUTGOING_TYPING_DEBOUNCE_MS);
}

Decisions

Calls that shaped it