Been messing about with irssi, which is definitely better than either ircII or BitchX. BitchX is the Emacs of IRC clients, funky and colourful though it is. Irssi is much more chill and is scriptable in Perl. I prefer the ircII scroll style of just letting text go off the top of the screen though. That way I can just scroll up with my wheel to see what’s been going on. Then again it wouldn’t be able to do it’s funky windows business. It doesn’t matter too much now I’ve worked out how to scroll up! In OS X, there is no meta key by default. There is an option in Terminal to use the option key though. Why the fuck this isn’t turned on by default I don’t know. I turned on a few other things as well, like terminal bell.

Using IRC and Irssi’s Perl support has made me think lots about scripting and bots. Here is a quick rundown of the script ideas I’ve had in the last few days:

• Bot to post to Hype
• Bot to notify the #hypothetical channel when somebody posts to Hype
• Bot to post here
• Bot to allow posting to a Wiki

And some Irssi scripts using Mail::Glue, including:

• Display current iTunes track
• Interface with iCal, adding events.

Some of the thinking here is based around the idea that IRC can serve as a meeting place. The nice thing about IRC as a meeting place is that you can start prefixing things with slashes and you’ve got a rich interface to the outside world.

Say I was chatting to a business contact and we agreed to set up a real world meeting, I could use an Irssi script or a bot to record the date and time of that meeting. Personally I could switch to iCal on my desktop, but IRC would provide a centralised way for groups to co-ordinate and save to a shared server. This server could then pump out data to our GUI calendering clients.

Another example, I’m chatting and I need to make a note. A bot connected to a Wiki lets me shoot a note straight on to the end of a page.

These ideas center on one thing, that sometimes you need to just quickly make a sticky. IRC is a simple beast, with a shallow (but broad) interface system. Implementations of bots and scripts tend to provide a simple way of doing a straighforward task. If I want to post to a Wiki, why do I have to go through three page requests in a GUI, when I can set up my IRC client with defaults and then just post with a one line command. The flexibility and intuitivity of a GUI is lost, but speed is gained in it’s place. And pretty colours. Pretty colours on black.