irc

[Chris Brannon]

Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at panix.com> writes:

> I now have irc running here and had tried epic5 earlier but couldn't
> figure which if any of its themes would be good for the command line
> accessibility I'm using.  Another couple environments I tried were erc
> inside of emacs (comes with current emacs already installed), and
> bitchx.

I've used quite a few IRC clients myself.

I don't know how epic5 compares to older versions, but I used older
versions of this many many years ago, often with the -d switch for dumb
terminals.  This disabled the curses GUI.  I did the same thing with
ircii back in the day.  In fact, ircii -d was what I used in the 1990s,
when all I had was a Braille 'n Speak, a modem, and a shell account.
These days, I might point people who want to run without curses at sic.

For a more full-featured console client, irssi is good,
but the default configuration is very, very annoying to use with
Speakup.  My irssi config files are a real mess, and I'd have to do a
bit of work to make them publicly shareable.  But I could do that if I
get requests.
Weechat is also nice, and here again, the default configuration really
sucks with Speakup.  Yeah, I detest most curses apps.
I could probably share my weechat config.  But honestly, what I need to
do is figure out the simple list of commands needed to generate a usable
configuration for both clients and then post those somewhere.

Finally, there's my favorite, erc within emacs, which you mentioned in
your message.  I love it.  I moved away from it at one time, because I
really needed the flexibility of irssi within screen, but I will
probably end up moving back to it sooner rather than later.
I only use it with emacspeak.  The nice thing about the erc emacspeak
combo is that you can enable or disable autospeaking of messages on a
channel by channel basis.
It's all very well integrated into emacs, so it's highly customizable.
Of course, if you want to script it, you'll need to know some Emacs
Lisp.