My thoughts in regard to the flaws of IRC clients.

000 CTCP VERSION reply from Nei: BitchX-1.1-final+ by panasync - Linux 2.6.16-2-vserver-em64t-p4 : Keep it to yourself!

Goals

I have high demands on IRC, because I like to track many places.

So far it has been difficult to find efficient, elegant, easy, yet powerful clients to fulfill my every need.

Now, I don’t think it is possible to ever reach “100%”.

But all the time being dissatisfied, I’ve tried to order my thoughts about the reasons for this,
and the approaches that would be necessary.

I’ve also realised that it is a difficult thing; and it seems to require careful planning.

If your code gets messy early on, doing things would seem to become almost exponentially more difficult.

I’ve inspected Irssi for a ways to bend the notify features in reach of my needs
and it is frigging impossible without major alterations in the core.

I’ve found that while everyone probably has dreamt of writing her own irc client at least once,
it is surprisingly difficult to get it done right — despite the simplistic protocol.

The protocol is amazingly simple,
yet it gets bended beyond.
And many people writing IRC servers, only check with the most popular client in that process.

Deciding how to show incoming data is the problem.

(Update the download has been removed but I preserve the post for itself. Please install irssi from Cygwin’s setup.exe)

This has been in my static folder at least since the official release of that version, but I hadn’t posted it on the website yet.

Back in the days, when I was looking for a Windows version of this rather popular *nix IRC client, they did not have a single working link on their website/ download page http://irssi.org/!

Of course you can always tell the users to “just build it yourself”, but seriously, which average user is capable of doing that?

So after researching the Internet and not finding any suitable Windows build of Irssi, I decided to fix that gap myself. So I created above build.

When I checked back at the time of writing this entry, they now link to a build of Irssi 0.8.9 on their download page; I would claim that this is no official build (but maybe they’ve gotten the creators permission to hot-link (deep-link) it).

I believe I had already found this build at the time when I was looking for one, and the website didn’t have any; but not only is it outdated (version-wise), it also does not support Perl, Irssi’s premier scripting binding. Since I like to enhance my client with several scripts, that was no good.

Also, there is a new feature called “recode” in Irssi 0.8.10, which (although it ultimately sucks) enables you to chat in places where ISO-8859 and UTF8 charsets are in mixed use.

Given these two reasons, the 0.8.9 version of Irssi was not an option to me.

For those interested in making their own Irssi/Cygwin builds on Windows, I’ve written down the necessary steps. Hit the jump to read them.

I was having a strange issue where all the superscript text on Wikipedia would cause huge gaps — giant line height.

I’d get to see big gaps between or in midst of paragraphs.

But best see for yourself:

Apparently this line spacing issue is caused by an erroneous font description in the DejaVu Sans Condensed font:
(Screenshot by equinox.)

I have since removed the font, and the problem is gone.

Don’t get me wrong, please. I haven’t written these scripts — I was
merely using them.

Because I’ve got them lying ‘round in my so called “Web Dump”
for a long time now, I thought I’d write a slightly more comprehensive
introduction to what made my life easier just a little while ago.

I hope this can be of interest to some of you, and maybe I have a lucky
hand with keywords so that even more people can benefit from these nice
scripts when a search engine spider picks them up.

I have lsted these works in no particular order:

• default.theme: Default theme for light background colour terminals
• niq.pl: BitchX like tab completion, fixed version
• ircuwhois.pl: Format additional whois output from Undernet IRCd (ircu)
• messages_bottom.pl: Make chat start at the bottom of the window (by printing many newlines on window creation)
• trackbar.pl: Draw a line at the position where you last left the window
• dccrelay.pl: Redirect DCC sends
• mouse_soliton.pl: Script which can read xterm mouse sequences
• question.pl: Fake a dialog like question near the prompt

Download default.theme

Now, this isn’t actually a script but it is important nonetheless. There
are quite some people using terminals with lightly coloured backgrounds,
and the Irssi default theme is particularly bad suited for these since
it hardcodes several text colours as white! This is a slightly
modified default theme simply replacing these with the black colour.

Download niq.pl

Let’s be honest for a second, the Irssi nick completion sucks. In
particular, it does not feature “partial” completion like BitchX or your
favourite shell might.

I found a script called niq on the “official” scripts page which
promised to relieve this shortcoming, but for some reason it wouldn’t
work.

So one day when I was muttering about this in the #irssi irc channel,
some guy (don’t remember you, sorry! contact me if you want credits.)
told me “well yea this is broken and there is a fixed version at
this-and-that place.”

And I was like “oh great why did noone ever tell me” — and this is
exactly the problem with the central Irssi scripts archive: badly
maintained.

I don’t even know what this page was where it had the fixed version,
sorry about that. But at least I mirrored the script so hopefully
someone will find it here.

Download ircuwhois.pl

This script is based on the quakenet.pl script I first found on
http://www.oberkommando.org/~senneth/irssi/scripts/ — I only extracted
the message formatting part, though.

Many IRC servers introduce reply codes which are not, or not fully
supported by Irssi. Since I was an avid user of QuakeNet and Undernet
IRC networks, which are both running the same software, I was
dissatisfied with Irssi’s presentation of the /whois output.

In particular, this script formats the reply containing the user’s account
name (this is used by network services), the user’s actual IP and
hostname (the hostname shown in the user@hostname string may be replaced
with a custom one on these networks), and whether the user is connected
via SSL (this is an extension not present on QuakeNet or Undernet,
though).

This script is not really important, but it was important to please my
aesthetical senses.

Download messages_bottom.pl

On a freshly started Irssi, all message text will start floating from
the top of page; just like when you open a new terminal on X11 or
‘clear’ your screen on the console.

I find this highly distracting, since whenever you are looking at a
window, you need to make a decision as to where exactly the text ends.

A much better approach is to fixate the viewpoint on the bottom line, as
will automatically happen with time, anyway.

This script will make it happen immediately, much improving my IRC
morning. Simply by printing a number of empty lines, the “cursor” will
be moved to the very end of screen and new messages will start appearing
at the bottom right away.

A yet better (and still missing) script would be one to reload the IRC
log files when you start Irssi. mIRC already has a builtin feature to do
this.

(There actually is a script to do the latter, at least for private
messages, on the official scripts archive. But it sucks so much that I
daren’t recommend it.)

Download trackbar22.pl

Once you’re in the flow of IRC, another important tool to keep track of
which messages are new is what mIRC calls the Line Marker. Whenever you
switch windows, it will add a horizontal line marking the position where
you switched away from this window.

That way, you’ll easily be able to refind the spot where you left off
reading the chat window when you return to it.

The mIRC original will only update the marker if you have actually
“visited” it, i.e. scrolled the screen so much that you could actually
see the marker (in case it had went off-screen). Unfortunately, there is
no such feature in this trackbar.pl version.

I am pretty sure that I once had a trackbar version which would allow you to directly jump in scrollback to the position at
which the trackbar is located. I wonder where it went. (I’m also fairly sure that I was using that mentioned version in the
last days, and not this one.)

This script has now been located and is available as trackbar22.pl

Download dccrelay.pl

This is actually a port of a mIRC script I stole from nnscript, I think.
In any case, depending on your circumstances a very handy script.

I used to run Irssi on a shell account, but wanted to receive DCC file
transfers directly to my home box. Well, this script does just that. It
forwards (relays) the DCC messages to another user on IRC.

This means you can redirect DCC file transfers to any other user; it is
not limited to your home box.

(The original mIRC source is included in the file.)

Download mouse_soliton.pl

The original version of this can actually be found on
http://wouter.coekaerts.be/irssi/. This script enables the mouse scroll
wheel to scroll the channel content as well as supporting some gesture
recognition to do stuff.

The problem with the mouse scripts is, that since they enable XTerm
mouse reporting, but Irssi does not actually support this in any way,
nor is it possible through scripts to simulate copying and pasting of
text, that it is difficult to copy like e.g. quotes or URIs out of the
Irssi terminal window.

This version is enhanced by Soliton to provide easy means to disable the
XTerm mouse reporting mode, in order to allow for easier access to
terminal copy&paste behaviour.

Download question.pl

The question script isn’t a script that I actually use, it was more like
a demo written by someone called Cydex to show how you can make a script
that asks the user a question — by overwriting the send command
and send text handlers.

There are a few problems with this though: how do you save the text user
has already inputted when the question arises? How do you restore it?