4 ms·

I recommend IRCCloud.com to people. I'm a huge fan of IRC but it's true the IRC protocol has many issues (I talked about them before on HN; can't find the link

I recommend IRCCloud.com to people. I'm a huge fan of IRC but it's true the IRC protocol has many issues (I talked about them before on HN; can't find the link now). IRCCloud may be (slightly) proprietary but at least it still only talks to IRC, and it's a good alternative to Slack&Friends (which are 100% proprietary) and webchat (which have the same issues as desktop clients and are generally atrociously ugly). Free IRCCloud accounts stay online 2 hours when shut off. I pay for mine, which stays online forever. It's a fairly similar experience to slack except I can still use the same open protocol as everyone else. Matrix is extremely promising but IMO not there yet.

lorenzhs 10y ago
I run WeeChat in a tmux and connect to it with Glowing Bear. It's a similar experience, and it's all free software. It also leverages the whole power of WeeChat in a nice interface (triggers, scripts, etc), so it can do some nice tricks that IRCcloud can't. Oh and there's also a Matrix script for WeeChat, so you can use matrix from WeeChat (and thus Glowing Bear)!
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Got some examples? I never tried WeeChat. I used to use Quassel (I liked the client a lot), but after my server died I figured it wasn't worth the trouble of maintaining it.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Examples for what? There are some screenshots of Glowing Bear on the GitHub page (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear) and in a blog post I once wrote (https://4z2.de/2014/04/10/glowing-bear https://4z2.de/2014/04/10/glowing-bear, probably outdated). I use it with a sans-serif font on the Desktop, too. The UI is quite hackable, you can add custom CSS rules to override things to your liking in the settings (simply changing the font doesn't require that, though). Some useful scripts include colorize_nicks.py (colourises nicks in messages, to make them stand out over the text) and grep.py (easily and efficiently search logs). Matrix.lua (https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script) allows you to use the Matrix protocol with WeeChat, and by extension Glowing Bear. Trigger-wise, I have triggers that remove colour from status messages (most of them are just noise) or replace (lenny) with ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) when I send a message, mostly because I can ;) Getting push notifications requires a bit of setup, but there are scripts for Pushbullet/Pushover/..., or irssi-notifier (which also works with WeeChat) to do that. It's a bit complicated because we don't run any servers (Glowing Bear is just a bunch of static files, everything happens in your browser or your WeeChat), so we can't provide push notifications out of the box. Disclosure: I'm one of the Glowing Bear devs, so I may be biased :)
- spinningarrow 10y ago
  Wow I just tried this setup (tried using WeeChat directly from the terminal a while back but somehow it didn't feel comfortable) and it's pretty darn good. Thanks!
voltagex_ 10y ago
How many times do you get nickserv alerts from IRCCloud (indicating that "your" client has reconnected). I use IRC enough that it's worth the money (I also support their work on IRCv3), but this is getting silly.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Seldom to never? I've seen a couple messages from chanserv when IRCCloud servers have problem, but no annoyance. Keep in mind though I pay for a premium account and I only connect to freenode.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I'm also on a premium account and get disconnected and reconnected at least once a week from OFTC - I thought I also got disconnected from Freenode, but now I'm not sure.
lmm 10y ago
Slack has an IRC gateway, so I think it's about as open as IRCCloud in practice. And the free version of IRCCloud has gradually got worse and worse - I think you're not allowed to connect to external servers any more, only to their one.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  > I think you're not allowed to connect to external servers any more, only to their one. What are you talking about? https://www.irccloud.com/pricing https://www.irccloud.com/pricing
  - lmm 10y ago
    It certainly was more restricted than 2 non-irccloud networks at one point. More generally you can't assume the free version will continue to have the same functionality, because they've reduced it before and could easily do so again.
- hueving 10y ago
  Can slack connect to arbitrary irc networks? If not, then it's not as close to open in practice.

lorenzhs 10y ago

I run WeeChat in a tmux and connect to it with Glowing Bear. It's a similar experience, and it's all free software. It also leverages the whole power of WeeChat in a nice interface (triggers, scripts, etc), so it can do some nice tricks that IRCcloud can't. Oh and there's also a Matrix script for WeeChat, so you can use matrix from WeeChat (and thus Glowing Bear)!

scrollaway 10y ago
Got some examples? I never tried WeeChat. I used to use Quassel (I liked the client a lot), but after my server died I figured it wasn't worth the trouble of maintaining it.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Examples for what? There are some screenshots of Glowing Bear on the GitHub page (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear) and in a blog post I once wrote (https://4z2.de/2014/04/10/glowing-bear https://4z2.de/2014/04/10/glowing-bear, probably outdated). I use it with a sans-serif font on the Desktop, too. The UI is quite hackable, you can add custom CSS rules to override things to your liking in the settings (simply changing the font doesn't require that, though). Some useful scripts include colorize_nicks.py (colourises nicks in messages, to make them stand out over the text) and grep.py (easily and efficiently search logs). Matrix.lua (https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script) allows you to use the Matrix protocol with WeeChat, and by extension Glowing Bear. Trigger-wise, I have triggers that remove colour from status messages (most of them are just noise) or replace (lenny) with ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) when I send a message, mostly because I can ;) Getting push notifications requires a bit of setup, but there are scripts for Pushbullet/Pushover/..., or irssi-notifier (which also works with WeeChat) to do that. It's a bit complicated because we don't run any servers (Glowing Bear is just a bunch of static files, everything happens in your browser or your WeeChat), so we can't provide push notifications out of the box. Disclosure: I'm one of the Glowing Bear devs, so I may be biased :)
spinningarrow 10y ago
Wow I just tried this setup (tried using WeeChat directly from the terminal a while back but somehow it didn't feel comfortable) and it's pretty darn good. Thanks!

voltagex_ 10y ago

How many times do you get nickserv alerts from IRCCloud (indicating that "your" client has reconnected). I use IRC enough that it's worth the money (I also support their work on IRCv3), but this is getting silly.

scrollaway 10y ago
Seldom to never? I've seen a couple messages from chanserv when IRCCloud servers have problem, but no annoyance. Keep in mind though I pay for a premium account and I only connect to freenode.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I'm also on a premium account and get disconnected and reconnected at least once a week from OFTC - I thought I also got disconnected from Freenode, but now I'm not sure.

lmm 10y ago

Slack has an IRC gateway, so I think it's about as open as IRCCloud in practice. And the free version of IRCCloud has gradually got worse and worse - I think you're not allowed to connect to external servers any more, only to their one.

scrollaway 10y ago
> I think you're not allowed to connect to external servers any more, only to their one. What are you talking about? https://www.irccloud.com/pricing https://www.irccloud.com/pricing
- lmm 10y ago
  It certainly was more restricted than 2 non-irccloud networks at one point. More generally you can't assume the free version will continue to have the same functionality, because they've reduced it before and could easily do so again.
hueving 10y ago
Can slack connect to arbitrary irc networks? If not, then it's not as close to open in practice.