Sunday·08·March·2009
Sedating irssi’s nick highlight for microblogging messages //at 17:13 //by abe
My favourite IRC client is irssi. I like it so much that I even use it for all my instant messaging needs. The gateway of choice between irssi and mostly Jabber is Bitlbee.
I also microblog on identi.ca, a free (free as in AGPL) microblogging service based on laconi.ca. In comparsion to the non-free and proprietary Twitter microblogging, identi.ca has all the features which Twitter turned off already again.
For me the most important feature of Twitter was tweeting via XMPP (aka Jabber). Since Twitter turned off that feature, Twitter increasingly fast became unimportant for me. Identi.ca still has this feature and cultivates it further. So usually don’t visit the identi.ca website that often anymore but get the microblogging stream of my friends via XMPP and Bitlbee directly into my irssi.
Although this is very convenient, it has one big disadvantage: In comparison to an IRC channel, not only notices directed to me personally but every incoming notice beeps, because Bitlbee sends them either as /MSG or prepends my nick name. For normal IRC communication /MSG should beep, and you can’t make exceptions for that so easily in irssi.
I asked on #bitlbee (OFTC) and on #irssi (IRCNet). On #irssi funnily the first answer was “I tried that yesterday, no success” from Shrike. — So I’m not alone, although Shrike uses Jaiku and not identi.ca. Then I had the idea to get Bitlbee to not prepend my nick name for all those identi.ca notices which go into the &bitlbee channel — but I didn’t find a way to configure this in Bitlbee. But Shrike found a way to do this with already existing irssi plugins:
The trigger.pl plugin (available e.g. in Debian’s irssi-scripts package or on scripts.irssi.org) can add triggers which replace parts of the message. So the following three lines helped me to reduce the noise microblogging causes in my irssi:
/script load trigger /trigger add -publics -masks 'identica!update@identi.ca' -channels '&bitlbee' -regexp "^XTaran: " -replace '' /trigger save
And on the command line I just needed a symlink to automatically start the trigger plugin on irssi startup:
ln -vis /usr/share/irssi/scripts/trigger.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/
So now again only the important messages beep. :-)
Tagged as: #bitlbee, #irssi, AGPL, Bitlbee, deb, highlight, identi.ca, IM, IRC, IRCNet, irssi, Jabber, jaiku, laconi.ca, microblogging, OFTC, Perl, plugin, Shrike, trigger, Twitter, XMPP
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