Weechat

I’ve been an irssi user for more than 7 years. Recently though, I started noticing people on IRC using weechat, another command-line-based client. I got a little curious this weekend and decided to give it a go and I must say that I am extremely impressed with it. I’ll be using it full time in the upcoming weeks to see how I like it. Here are some of the features I like after a couple days of usage:

• Scriptable in Python: Perl, Ruby, Lua and Tcl can also be used, but since Python is one of my favourite languages, that makes scripting for weechat all the more attractive to me
• The nicknames of the people speaking are all neatly aligned and separated from their message at the same column, making it very easy to read.
• Like in graphical clients, weechat maintains a list of the nicknames on each channel
• Highly configurable: I haven’t found many default settings that were to my dislike that I couldn’t change easily.

There are also things I disliked:

• Windows don’t maintain their position: if you scroll up in one window, switch to another one and come back, the original window will be at the bottom of its buffer again, not where you left it. There’s a ticket opened for that problem, hopefully it is fixed soon.
• When you type a long message in irssi, when you reach the right edge of the terminal, the text is move to the left by about a third of the width of the terminal. weechat just keeps on going, always hugging the right edge of the terminal. This is not a showstopper, but it’s a little annoying. Weechat allows the input bar’s height to be configured, which tells me that a nice solution to this problem would be to increase the height as the input reaches the right edge of the window and resets to its original size afterwards.
• Because the messages are between the aligned nicknames and the nickname list, long URLs are a pain in the neck to open. Some scripts available on the weechat website deal with this problem, but none in a way that I really like. Ideally, I’d want to be able to press a key combination, have a window of the URLs said in this particular channel that would allow me to use the up and down keys to select the one that I wish to open, press Return to open the link. Upon pressing Return, the URL list window would be closed (or kept open, this could be configurable). If I like weechat enough, I just might try to write it myself.