NCurses Direct Connect

Ncdc is a lightweight direct connect client with a friendly ncurses interface.

Get ncdc!

Latest version

1.24.1 (2024-07-18 - ncdc-1.24.1.tar.gz ⓘ - changes)

Convenient static binaries for Linux: x86-64 ⓘ - i486 ⓘ - ARM ⓘ - AArch64 ⓘ. Check the installation instructions for more info.

Development version

The latest development version is available from git and can be cloned using git clone git://g.blicky.net/ncdc.git. The repository is available for online browsing.

Requirements

The following libraries are required: ncurses, zlib, bzip2, sqlite3, glib2 and gnutls.

Ncdc is entirely written in C and available under a liberal MIT license.

Community

• Bug tracker - For bugs reports, feature requests and patches.
• adcs://dc.blicky.net:2780/ - For real-time chat.
  TLS fingerprint as of 2024-10-04 is 5ZFSEGG26HUYZ7NXD6BARU6JHGLF7WNCP3LNYEFACMPRDFJKUEVA.

Packages and ports

Are available for the following systems: Arch Linux - Debian - Fedora - FreeBSD - Frugalware - GNU Guix - Gentoo - Homebrew - OpenSUSE - Source Mage - Ubuntu - Void Linux.

A convenient installer is available for Android as well.

Features

Common features all non-ancient DC clients (should) have:

• Connecting to multiple hubs at the same time,
• Support for both ADC and NMDC protocols,
• Chatting and private messaging,
• Browsing the user list of a connected hub,
• Share management and file uploading,
• Connections and download queue management,
• File list browsing,
• TTH-checked, multi-source and segmented file downloading,
• Searching for files,
• Secure hub (adcs:// and nmdcs://) and client connections on both protocols,
• Bandwidth throttling,
• IPv6 support.

And special features not commonly found in other clients:

• Different connection settings for each hub,
• Encrypted UDP messages (ADC SUDP),
• Subdirectory refreshing,
• Nick notification and highlighting in chat windows,
• Trust on First Use for TLS-enabled hubs,
• A single listen port for both TLS and TCP connections,
• Efficient file uploads using sendfile(),
• Large file lists are opened in a background thread,
• Doesn’t trash your OS file cache (with the flush_file_cache option enabled),
• (Relatively…) low memory usage.

What doesn’t ncdc do?

Since the above list is getting larger and larger every time, it may be more interesting to list a few features that are (relatively) common in other DC clients, but which ncdc doesn’t do. Yet.

• NAT Traversal,
• OP features (e.g. client detection, file list scanning and other useful stuff for OPs),
• SOCKS support.

Of course, there are many more features that could be implemented or improved. These will all be addressed in later versions (hopefully :).