Too late to edit the original post, but thanks to anoa for fixing up my crappy bash there's a version that actually works now at https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh. The uglinesses are mainly bash's fault rather than matrix's ;P
comedy punchline; turns out that people are actually using this monstrosity in the wild:
> I used bashtrix for about 4 hours this morning. Why, you ask? I didn't have the bandwidth, latency or reliability to use Riot. I ended up using bashtrix on one of my servers through mosh...
> Could have done with scroll back (the screen fills up with 'null' and '[]' – the latter, I started to recognise as marking read receipts and/or perhaps presence) but shrank the font size down and made the most of it :p. Worked Rather well considering
> I used bashtrix for about 4 hours this morning. Why, you ask? I didn't have the bandwidth, latency or reliability to use Riot. I ended up using bashtrix on one of my servers through mosh...
> Could have done with scroll back (the screen fills up with 'null' and '[]' – the latter, I started to recognise as marking read receipts and/or perhaps presence) but shrank the font size down and made the most of it :p. Worked Rather well considering