Profanity is a console based XMPP client written in C using ncurses and libstrophe, inspired by Irssi. Cross platform, lightweight, very handy. Takes a bit of fiddling to manage multiple accounts, though.

This is a really simple matrix chat client. Just for simple use but also to mess around with the Matrix protocol. You can drop into the python interpeter in the middle of a chat and poke around with the Matrix Python SDK. Uses ncurses.

A module for python that abstracts away the annoying parts of ncurses and lets you build console-based user-interfaces. Has a collection of widgets that can be assembled into larger projects. Also has graph, text editing, file browsing, subprocess initiation and monitoring, color palettes, sub-windows, and font manipulation primitives.