From Turf Battles Wiki

All players begin with multiple methods of communication which show up in the bottom left of the UI called the chat box. Players can Talk to players nearby, so that their text appears in the chatbox of everyone within a small area which shows up blue, Shout to players further away, which costs 5hp but travels further and shows up green, and Whisper to specific other characters from across the map by either clicking on their name in the chat box, or manually typing it in after selecting the whisper function. In addition to these three built in communication channels, there are two additional channels which can be manually created by any player in the Magic Shells located in your inventory and all players with that channel selected can speak to each other from anywhere within that Server (and each sub-server can speak to members on the other sub-server but not separate servers). Right click on the shells in your inventory to enter a name for the channel or select one of the official channels already existing. Each player starts with the Newbie and Market channel already added, in addition to the PvPChannel and General channel as possible official alternatives. In addition, after players join or create a tribe, a 6 chat option appears specifically for communication with members of that tribe, that reaches all members of the tribe as long as they are on the same server (regardless of which sub-sever).

System Messages appear in the top box and can be move separately or almost completely moved off the screen (just careful not to lose it). Normal player communication is in the bottom box and can be filtered using the different options along the top. You can switch freely between these filters and not lose any messages. You can hide both boxes by pressing C and you can select what chat you wish to communicate on by clicking o the bottom left of the chat box, to the left of where you enter your text. Additionally you can use the following hotkeys:

Ctrl + ' : "Talk" Chat Mode

Ctrl + 1 : "Shout" chat mode

Ctrl + 2 : Whisper chat mode

Ctrl + 3 : Party chat mode (only if you are in a party)

Ctrl + 4 : Left Magic Shell (Newbie/Market/PvPChannel, etc)

Ctrl + 5 : Right Magic Shell (Newbie/Market/PvPChannel, etc)

Ctrl + 6 : Match Chat Mode (only during tournaments)

Ctrl + 7 : Tribe chat mode (only if you belong to a tribe)

.  : Reply to the last person to whisper you.

C  : Hide or show the Chat Windows