Someone once describe the Go programming language to me as "an opinionated language." Similarly, discoirc is an opinionanted IRC client.
These opinions are my own; if you disagree with them, you're welcome to use any other client. :-)
I use IRC, and the terminal, every day at my day job. That's likely to continue for the indefinite future.
discoirc should let the user do basic IRC stuff:
- Join, leave, manage channels and networks
- Filter, search, and prioritize messages (highlights / notifications)
- Extract logs
- Do so securely to the requirement of the network
discoirc should be no more annoying to use than my current irssi setup.
That's the low bar - the higher bar is "easy and intuitive to use."
The IRCv3 working group is working to better standardize,
modernize, and extend the IRC protocol. discoirc should support / pursue /
adhere to that, and should support modern technologies pertinent to IRC:
- Basic (not really secure) auth (e.g. passwords)
- Crypto (SSL, SASL) auth
- 🦄Stretch: TCP handoff for transparent restarts
- Unicode-first
It should also integrate, where reasonable, with other chat systems (e.g. Slack IRC gateway)
Lots of terminal programs incorporate a layer of window management
functionality. vim has multiple windows in which multiple files, or selections from the same file, can be open. irssi has windows and channels. Both let you lay those windows out in various ways.
But this means that most of the time, there's a bunch of layers of window management open:
- A GUI window manager
- A terminal emulator
- A terminal window manager
- Whatever program is open
Each of these offers ways to split their view, and to navigate between adjacent views. That's a lot of overhead to switch between one view and the adjacent one- which keybinding do I use? Do I have to move "left" at one layer of management, and then "right" at the next?
There's some ways to reduce this complexity. For instance, I use xterm as my
terminal emulator, without messing with tabs or splits or anything like that.
There's also some neat tricks you can play to get vim and tmux to use the
same bindings for window-switching.
But, if we're already using a higher-level window manager... why not integrate
with it, rather than doing internal window management? Many GUI applications
already take this approach to some extent, e.g. Pidgin and GIMP. It's more difficult to do with terminal window managers... but at least there are fewer to integrate with (tmux and screen).
It's a core principle in GUI applications to avoid blocking UI threads (often, "the UI thread", singular) on long events, e.g. network operations. This desire to not do window management within the application encourages this behavior on a larger scale - to separate out the process that has an IRC connection from the UI views, which may come and go.
Many IRC users already do this through a slightly different mechanism - starting an IRC bouncer that connects to networks, and connecting their IRC client to the bouncer. But this doesn't necessarily result in persistence; you still have to handle logs, handle highlights of messages when away, etc.
discoirc's goal is to implement this by default- to have persistent
connections and presence by default.
(As a note, I don't use an IRC bouncer myself- I leave irssi open in tmux,
and attach
to the tmux session.)
The Internet has progressed a lot since IRC's heyday. It's still in use - I use it on an everyday basis - but there's a lot of stuff in the protocol, and in clients, that we don't need.
We don't need to send files over IRC. We don't need to have a 'now-playing' plugin hook in the client. We don't need e.g. URL rewriting within the client (if it's useful to do, have a bot that does it for everyone in the channel.) We don't need to imlement non-UTF-8 character sets.