In Paris, dgoulet and I started to write some basic torsocks support for SocksSocket (legacy/trac#12585) - in an ideal world, we'd have a Tor with a SocksSocket running by default. This would allow torsocks to do useful things by default - namely - any app can be instantly torified without worries about firewalls, users can be isolated from different socks proxies by uid, etc. Basically, I think it means that torsocks could default to SocksSocket, if built on a SocksSocket supporting platform. I think for changes, we'd want to do the following: Add a configuration (in /etc/torsocks.conf ) option for the default SocksSocket location eg: /var/lib/tor/SockSocket stat() the default SocksSocket file location if we find a SockSocket, we switch to AF_UNIX for all communications normal torsocks failures from here out if we don't find a SocksSocket fail hard? fail soft? if we fail soft, switch to the default _server_ configured if that fails, give an error and fail hard dgoulet - do you still have the patch we started to write in paris?