Tincan — P2P voice and text chat in the terminal, built on iroh

[bilalyazicioglu]

Hey! I've been building Tincan, an open-source P2P voice and text chat that runs entirely in the terminal. I started it because I wanted something closer to dropping into a voice room from the terminal, without accounts or a central room server. Iroh ended up becoming the networking layer behind it.

For voice, Tincan sends Opus audio in real time between peers, while iroh handles peer connectivity, NAT traversal and relay fallback when a direct path isn't available. The TUI also exposes some of that network state — you can see whether a peer is direct or relayed, along with latency and connection quality.

A few things it has now:

• P2P voice + text rooms
• no accounts or sign-up
• Opus audio + RNNoise noise suppression
• push-to-talk and per-peer volume
• direct / relay / latency indicators in the TUI
• Linux, macOS and Windows builds

One of the interesting parts for me has been using iroh for real-time traffic rather than file transfer or request/response-style workloads. There are still some rough edges and networking decisions I'm iterating on, so feedback from people familiar with iroh would be especially useful.

GitHub: https://github.com/bilalyazicioglu/tincan-cli
Website/demo: https://tincan.rs

[flub]

Very cool!