Thanks! I agree. I want to provide more client-side options eventually (e.g. a static binary or pick your language flavor cli), but had a bunch of tradeoffs to consider for first pass. I'll likely open source the client side and keep the ssh api backward compatible, so perhaps this can happen soon.

Re: ssh-based chat. I found that post very very early on while exploring gitern as just an idea! Very formative of gitern.