GitHub - emacs-circe/circe: Circe, a Client for IRC in Emacs

Some cool stuff went down in the world of Internet Relay Chat during the past six months and we should take a look at it. Irssi is back! In the last news article, I mentioned that the development of the Irssi terminal client had slowed down and that there was an active fork. Since then, the changes from Nei’s fork were integrated upstream. The increased coordination lead to the release of Irssi version 1.4.1 in June. Many new IRCv3 features became available.

In this article we look at the happenings in the IRC ecosystem during the second half of 2020. The great number of active software projects demonstrates a broad interest in specifying and implementing modern IRC standards. The article was written in January 2021 and was supposed to be published somewhere else, but due to delays I decided to create this blog site to finally get it out. It seems that the pandemic of 2020 with its influence on remote work and communication also had an impact on the interest in IRC. During the research phase of this article, it became clear that many were dusting off their old IRC projects and making them run on the latest software stacks. Numerous new projects had also entered development. For every active project included in this article, several others were left out due to being clearly personal, too young or still experimental.

This article is dedicated to the Finnish rap group Lyömättömät, who use IRC to interact with the audience of their national radio show. Let’s look at the happenings in the IRC ecosystem during the first half of 2021. Palaver ❤️ Ergo A cool collaboration story during this period is Palaver iOS app working with Ergo daemon (formerly known as Oragono) in order to build a new standard on push notifications for IRC (Ergo issues 1527 and 1626 discuss the topic). Ergo now offers a network intended for production use. The network provides always-on, chat history and multiclient functionality out of the box, without the need to set up your own bouncer. It also supports relaying messages to channels on other networks, implementing the still unpublished RELAYMSG spec.

🎵 So here it is, Merry IRCmas / Lots of coding getting done! 🎵 Yes indeed, I went and read a bunch of changelogs and commits again to bring you some interesting bits from the world of IRC. Protocol specifications Work-in-progress extensions pre-away and no-implicit-names were added. Documentation Modern IRC Client Protocol docs received updates and clarifications related to client nickname syntax and WHO. Mobile clients Lith screenshot goguma - for mobile Linux and Android Version 0.6.0 was released in December with support for the draft/pre-away extension (to not toggle the away flag when synchronizing chat history in the background), geo URIs and sharing current geolocation and the commands /join, /kick, /mode and /quote.

The IRC world was bustling as ever during the past six months, with new projects springing up and existing ones being enriched and polished. Protocol specifications The IRCv3 Working Group published a 2022 spec round-up article. Extended monitor was ratified and the requirement to set account-tag on all messages was relaxed. Documentation Modern IRC Client Protocol docs received updates related to messages such as WHOIS and AWAY. Mobile clients goguma screenshot showing image previews Communi for Sailfish - The first and foremost IRC client for Sailfish OS Many improvements were made to notifications.

There’s a smörgåsbord of IRC happenings in this post, including multiple new desktop clients as well as clients for Sega Megadrive/Genesis and those old Macs that look like birdhouses. A presentation about IRC modernisation will be given at FOSDEM conference on 1 Feb 2025. A video recording will be made available after the conference. There’s a new commercial service for bouncer access hosted in France called IRC Today. It is run by delthas, creator of the senpai client and contributor to projects such as soju.

Although fine-tuning your slack notifications is already reason enough to run slack in Emacs, that’s only the beginning. Once everything is up and running you get to decide what you want out of your slack. Some of the snippets below simply make up for missing functionality, other customize the package beyond what you can do on the Slack Webapp.