Metadata-Version: 2.4
Name: lantern-chat
Version: 1.4.9
Summary: A TUI chat application for your terminal
Author-email: Benji Brown <benjnib09@gmail.com>, Dennis Upton <dennisjupton@gmail.com>
Maintainer-email: Benji Brown <benjnib09@gmail.com>, Dennis Upton <dennisjupton@gmail.com>
License: MIT
Project-URL: Homepage, https://github.com/benjibrown/lantern
Project-URL: Issues, https://github.com/benjibrown/lantern/issues
Requires-Python: >=3.8
Description-Content-Type: text/markdown
License-File: LICENSE
Requires-Dist: rich
Requires-Dist: Pillow
Requires-Dist: opencv-python
Dynamic: license-file

<div align='center'>

# Lantern

A curses based chat client and server.


![PyPI - Downloads](https://img.shields.io/pypi/dw/lantern-chat)
</div>


### Screenshots
<div align="center"> <a href=""><img src="https://u.cubeupload.com/benjibrown/screenshot2026030620.png" alt='image' width='800'/></a> </div>




## Getting Started
> Note: Lantern is not designed to be hugely secure, so don't use it for anything you care about. Please ...
> Additionally, this has been tested primarily on Linux, so there are likely to be some issues on other platforms. If you find any, please report them or better yet, fix them and make a pull request. I am unable to test on Windows so I would appreciate any PR's that add support for it.

### Prerequisites

- Python
- Pip package manager
- a brain


### Installation

```
pip install lantern-chat
```

### Usage
To start the server, run:
```
lantern-server
```
You can specify a custom port with the `-p` flag, for example:
```
lantern-server -p 12345
```
To start the client, run:
```
lantern
```
You can specify the server host and port with the `-s` and `-p` flags, for example:
```
lantern -s 1.1.1.1 -p 12345
```

The default port is 6000 and default server host is localhost.

All client and server config is saved to `~/.config/lantern/config.json` and `~/.config/lantern/server_config.json` respectively.
In the server config, you can set the server admins, port, message and fetch cooldown.


# Details

Lantern requires a server to be running at the configured host and port for clients to be able to connect and communicate. This can either be locally (using default server IP and port in client config) which will allow you to communicate across a LAN or by setting up the server on a public facing IP (eg using a VPS) or by tunnelling a port on your local network to a publicly accessible IP.

## Compatibility 
- Linux (fully supported, tested on Fedora, Asahi Fedora, Arch)
- MacOS (supported but not tested in depth)
- Windows (seems to work but is untested, there are likely to be some issues)


## Contributing

Just make a pull req. lol
