ZUSE: IRC terminal client

by babycommando • 12 months ago

106 69 12 months ago

I know its built on pretty large abstractions, but I think its impressive to get an entire IRC TUI client out of ~1k lines with comments & formatting.

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Thanks!! I'm going to improve the readability to enable contributions. Hope you liked ::)

DigiEggz• 12 months ago

Excited to check this out! Nice work!

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Thank you! ::)

sho_hn• 12 months ago

Something tells me you might enjoy this:

https://www.printables.com/model/1251667-mechanical-nand-uni...

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Absolutely lovely!!

javier2• 12 months ago

Ok that is pretty cool print

alberth• 12 months ago

Unsolicited feedback, can the IRC screenshots have more contrast (and also not show such a vibrant distracting background).

The combination of those two make it difficult to even see what you’ve made.

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Someone get this man an oled screen! Jokes apart, thanks for the tips!

fastasucan• 12 months ago

The colours are really jarring, and would out me off immediately (even though its just a theme). Highly recommend some more popular/less jarring themes on the screenshots.

alrs• 12 months ago

"Modern" is the most passive-aggressive adjective in the history of HN.

babycommando19• 12 months ago

long live hexchat!!

snvzz• 12 months ago

long live amIRC[0]!

0. https://www.amirc.org/

anonym295• 12 months ago

To be clear, you still can't click, drag, and highlight text for basic operations like quickly and easily copying some text in any Bubbletea/Lipgloss interfaces, right?

Unless that has changed, that dynamic places this behind most other CLI-based IRC clients, including some that are decades old.

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Thats neat actually, will take a look into how viable it can be. Bubbletea (and lipgloss) are like CSS for the terminal, you do the styling, calculate margins, manage responsive things wich is quite cool already. I believe what you mean is totally doable, just that I'm not much of a mouse user myself - it slows me down. Thanks for the feedback.

anonym295• 12 months ago

For what it's worth, I rarely do use the mouse in my terminal, but on those few occasions when I do want to, Bubbletea/Lipgloss applications have had a history of being pretty infuriating for me as a user.

P.S. Keep up the great work! The world needs more IRC.

wredcoll• 12 months ago

How is this separate from what a terminal normally provides?

anonym295• 12 months ago

I can select text with my mouse cursor in all terminal applications that are not Bubbletea/Lipgloss, and cannot do so in Bubbletea/Lipgloss applications.

yoz-y• 12 months ago

Wait, how can you not copy paste from a terminal application?

Or is this about to have break-line aware copy in panes (such as in tmux)?

anonym295• 12 months ago

You can't even select text via mouse cursor in Bubbletea/Lipgloss applications, let alone copy.

Pasting works fine.

boredemployee2• 12 months ago

tangential question: are there still any IRC servers and (small) channels with cool people? I recently lost a virtual friend I had talked to for over 20 years, all thanks to some random mIRC channel back in the day. he ran the server with a bunch of ppl for so long. so sad. i really miss the times when we could have fun with just plain text.

babycommando19• 12 months ago

ZUSE was initially made to go along a CLI I've built for a synthwave radio NightrideFM (https://nightride.fm/), that has a hacker subchannel named Rekt Network (https://rekt.fm/). Both communities are still very active there!

irc.rekt.network:6697 channels: #rekt,#nightride TLS true

Also checkout the Nightride cli at https://github.com/babycommando/nightride-cli

anthk4• 12 months ago

Very slow to play in my N270 netbook, but OFC any other IRC client works fine.

And, well, I'll just open the radio playlist with mocp.

lmm• 12 months ago

No. Text-first chat is great, but the people who stuck to IRC this long are all sysadmin-luddites or otherwise deeply weird.

benreesman• 12 months ago

I hang out on IRC. Its not active like back in the day but a lot of OG legends lurk and a couple of times a day you can help someone switch to Linux if you have time. I have a TODO to get more serious about finding active channels.

pabs3• 12 months ago

There are lots of IRC servers still running, both big and small, some of them are listed here:

https://netsplit.de/

0xEF• 12 months ago

I've been using IRC on and off for three decades, now. It will never be what it was, so don't expect much. Most of channels are kept alive by bots and otherwise idling accounts like mine that drop into the background of our desktop and get forgotten about for days, sometimes weeks at a time. The political channels on a few servers are, of course, active but you'll not find any useful discourse there since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots. I assume they are not what you meant by "cool people."

Whatever cool people there were have either died or saw the writing on the wall as IRC slowly faded into obscurity with the introduction of better (debatable) chat systems, especially these days with things like Discord or Slack that do every IRC does in some capacity and more, perhaps most importantly simply making chat accessible in a safe way to less technically savvy users. That genie is kinda out of the bottle, so getting anyone aside from grumpy old guard to use IRC versus the modern alternatives is pretty much impossible. As a result, and aside from the bots doing things like letting me play IdleRPG or whatever, you're more likely to encounter people like me who don't feel like we fit in anywhere or conspiracy theorists, returning to IRC the way Romero's zombies wandered to the shopping mall because they had a vague memory of it from a former life.

akikoo• 12 months ago

since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots

Just join Libera's #politics. Full-on leftist politics where another opinion is not allowed

thesuitonym• 12 months ago

I haven't been in a while, but tilde.chat used to be pretty good, and it looks like it's still fairly active.

cykros• 12 months ago

IRC? Heck, there's still FIDOnet echos and usenet groups still active if you know where to look.

Just a lot of ghost towns in between them.

anthk4• 12 months ago

You can access FIDO over NNTP at https://syncro.net (news://cvs.synchro.net to get the groups) and Usenet at https://eternal-september.org, with news://eternal-september.org (or snews:// for TLS, secure times) for the same group fetching.

On the ghosts towns, with FIDO/DOVE you get far less posts, but every group has some content. With Usenet, you either have loaded technical groups (and some less tech bound ones such as misc.internet.discuss) plus some niche hobbies (chess, classical music...) except modern PC gaming. The rest, as you said... shadows from better places.

For postmodern bullshiters, hauntology it's never a thing on open services. There's always some people having fun there. Former propietary or web bound services are dead, forgotten and lost. Such as MySpace, Digg, unpatched MSN-AOL-ICQ, the Spanish slashdot clone (Barrapunto), Libertonia (es.comp.os.linux related slashdot clone) and so on.

iJohnDoe• 12 months ago

Impressive. Will give it a try.

jcastro• 12 months ago

Would love to see this for matrix!

babycommando19• 12 months ago

Good idea!

CyMonk• 12 months ago

not minimal, but there is "iamb- A Matrix client for Vim addicts"

https://github.com/ulyssa/iamb

Arathorn• 12 months ago

There's also https://github.com/gomuks/gomuks/tree/master for golang folks (although it's currently doing a transition to being a web client... and then back to being a TUI apparently)

emersion• 12 months ago

Similar (but more mature) client : https://sr.ht/~delthas/senpai/

babycommando19• 12 months ago

oh there is a wide range of IRC clients for the terminal indeed. The project here was to implement bubbletea/lipgloss. Its like CSS for terminal UIs! Check it out when you can, pretty neat visuals.

kseistrup• 12 months ago

Does anyone know if senpai or zuse can identify with a certificate?

mariusor3• 12 months ago

I don't understand projects like these. Open source is mainly driven by people that want to do something with computers that's not yet possible so they write some code to help them.

However TUI IRC clients already exist in the form of venerable weechat, and all the other examples people already gave in the thread.

So I ask what is the purpose? Learning? Sure I can see that, but why is a project with 5 commits being presented on HN as some kind of innovative application? Trustworthy projects need tenure and they need humility. This has neither.

that_lurker2• 12 months ago

I don't understand why people are always against people posting interesting projects here. Showing it to people is a very nice way to get feedback on things and then when it gets reposted again in the future we can see what has changed from looking back on the first post.

mariusor3• 12 months ago

An interesting project needs to fulfill a couple of requirements that I think this specific one doesn't: solves a problem that people have in some capacity, it's proven to be something more than a one weekend adventure, and is actually doing something innovative or interesting.

I understand I'm being overly negative here, and that there's at least 60 people disagreeing with me, but tell me why is this project interesting for you?

RamblingCTO• 12 months ago

Well, you also developed an alternative to go-fed, didn't you? ;) Was it innovative or necessary? Absolutely not. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

ClueslessTech99• 12 months ago

Does it support IRCv3?

anthk4• 12 months ago

Catgirl it's good enough. For TLS-less connections such as Bitlbee, swirc looks fine, but catgirl it's simpler.

dlojudice• 12 months ago

The real tragedy isn't IRC clients, but that IRC missed its chance to become the dominant decentralized protocol before Slack/Teams took over. The core issue wasn't just tooling. IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting. While IRCv3 improved extensibility, it didn't address these feature gaps. It seems that IRC's simplicity was both its strength and fatal weakness. Great for tech communities, but too bare-bones for mainstream adoption. I feel that we traded decentralization for features, and now we're stuck with proprietary silos

babycommando19• 12 months ago

its still got the underground vibe tho

plastic-enjoyer• 12 months ago

IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting.

Aren't this primarily client- and server-related issues and not something that is an issue with the protocol itself?

adtac• 12 months ago

this is just XMPP and it has been around for years before Slack was even a thing

Slack won anyway for the same reasons most centralised, commercial, closed sourced products often win: less fragmentation, more marketing, stronger network effects, simpler onboarding for normies, richer integrations, and most importantly, an enterprise sales team that actually showers

anthk4• 12 months ago

Jabber it's that, and it had been around since nearly 20 years.

sva_• 12 months ago

IRC Chat
Internet Relay Chat Chat

babycommando19• 12 months ago

IRC is more famous than Internet Relay Chat, so yeah, Internet Relay Chat Chat

haggis-alt2• 12 months ago

Awesome job nightrider!

haggis-alt2• 12 months ago

Great job nightrider!

babycommando19• 12 months ago

the legend himself!

ZUSE: IRC terminal client

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