Ran synapse for a few months, figured out all the tui clients are either abandonware or broken (originally thought i could use bitlbee, and did the install before realizing it was unusable).

Looked at current tui offerings now some years later, situation seems to be unchanged, the only client that ran back then was gomuks, and that has received a rewrite that hasn't reached feature parity yet.

I am probably the type of person referred to in the last part of xkcd 1782.