Andreas Fuchs' Journal: September 2005 Archives

There was a lot of progress in the development of Beirc since my last entry. We (splittist, mgr and I) fixed the three most annoying things so far:

• You no longer have to hit the “/” key to be able to click on presentations. It’s funny how before, everybody said that they don’t mind hitting “/” before reaching for the mouse; but now, I don’t think anybody would want to go back.
• Hitting RET in the middle of a line doesn’t land you in the debugger, and
• Tab completion now works.

Then, there are dozens of little things that we improved (better message display, useful customizations and defaults, timestamps in columns, more presentations and more clickable things). And of course, there’s mgr’s wonderful new tab-layout-pane code (lisp porn here).

So, beirc is rapidly becoming an IRC client that I really enjoy using (and, of course, hacking on). Join in the fun on #beirc!

I’ve spent some time lately hacking on beirc, the McCLIM-optimized CLIM IRC client by Gilbert Baumann. The version you find in the CVS repository at common-lisp.net comes with a neat channel selector that may remind you of xchat. Channels are shown red if there was activity on the channel that you didn’t see yet and blue if there were messages on the channel that contained your nickname.

You can see it in action in this screenshot.

I really like how easy CLIM makes adding new features like this channel selector. The code for the actual selector, including the activity indicator is only a few tens of lines. (the new channel selection mechanism I had to implement is a bit more than that, but that’s GUI toolkit independent)