It’s a dozen small things that have all added up to a much better experience for me. I’ll pull out a few:
ZNC used to crash every few weeks on my little VPS. Soju runs on the same cheap machine with no such issues.
history playback works really well, if you have logs turned on you can just keep scrolling back in time, inside the client
with lots of channels, weechat would take ages to play back history, basically locking you out as it updated channel by channel
when you log in, all your servers and channels are immediately shown in the clients. With ZNC I had to create profiles for each server.
On a personal level, the ‘out of the box’ config for senpai is perfect for me. I spent a long time tweaking weechat.
More broadly, these programs all feel like they are part of an ecosystem, and work together really well. This makes a multi-device setup more manageable.
I’ve not yet found a downside to goguma or senpai, but there are some to the soju bouncer:
fiddly to setup non-tls connections
fiddly to setup networks which require commands to be sent upon connection
Nice to see these new-ish developments in the IRC world (even though I’m still using good old Quassel for all my IRCing)! Bit surprised by the “bubble” styling of the chat views, for IRC that somehow feels really odd to me.
Bubble chat views feel more natural when you enable link preview (disabled by default for obvious privacy reason). It also works better with users who aren’t really geeky but still want to take part in conversation with geeky friends :)
This being said you can enable the compact mode if you prefer the “traditional” look of IRC clients: https://i.imgur.com/VIQjXBt.png
Why this fixation on imitating a messenger app? For me, the style of UI is an obvious mismatch for IRC. The traditional compact text with the nickname inline, uses up the limited screen real estate much more efficiently.
This chat bubbles visual is suited for mobile one to one communication because Trafic is low and mostly 1 to 1. But I fail tu understand why anyone would think it would be a good idea for an IRC cliente.
There’s no fixation: you can enable the denser ‘compact mode’ which matches your description of a traditional compact text with inline nickname: https://i.imgur.com/VIQjXBt.png
I’m in charge of the publication of Goguma on iOS. We have an issue tracking all the features not available yet on iOS: https://todo.sr.ht/~emersion/goguma/138
We are still working on notification support, as iOS has strict requirements for background tasks. Besides that, it works decently well and has good accessibility.
Had a look at it: their extension is unfortunately just sending requests to a closed source API that they host, which is supposedly doing the actual APNS requests :(
Goguma, the soju bouncer and the senpai IRC have transformed my IRC life. Up until recently I’d been a very very long ZNC and weechat user.
These new tools have modernised my whole setup while still being quite unixy, and their configs and admin are much easier to manage.
Thank you for the list, I’m looking into making my own znc+weechat setup better and switching out the tools might be really good.
Goguma
Soju
Senpai
Looks like it won’t have the same backlog barfing issue I currently have when my weechat machine reconnects to the ZNC bouncer.
In what ways has your IRC life been transformed?
It’s a dozen small things that have all added up to a much better experience for me. I’ll pull out a few:
On a personal level, the ‘out of the box’ config for senpai is perfect for me. I spent a long time tweaking weechat.
More broadly, these programs all feel like they are part of an ecosystem, and work together really well. This makes a multi-device setup more manageable.
I’ve not yet found a downside to goguma or senpai, but there are some to the soju bouncer:
Soju was my entrance into the bouncer world and have been pretty happy with it.
Senpai also rocks
I believe it is the soju bouncer that comes with a paid SourceHut subscription
ZNC is hands down one of the most obtuse pieces of software I’ve ever tried to set up and use.
Nice to see these new-ish developments in the IRC world (even though I’m still using good old Quassel for all my IRCing)! Bit surprised by the “bubble” styling of the chat views, for IRC that somehow feels really odd to me.
Bubble chat views feel more natural when you enable link preview (disabled by default for obvious privacy reason). It also works better with users who aren’t really geeky but still want to take part in conversation with geeky friends :)
This being said you can enable the compact mode if you prefer the “traditional” look of IRC clients: https://i.imgur.com/VIQjXBt.png
Just tried it and it’s incredible!
Thelounge is great on mobile too
Why this fixation on imitating a messenger app? For me, the style of UI is an obvious mismatch for IRC. The traditional compact text with the nickname inline, uses up the limited screen real estate much more efficiently.
This chat bubbles visual is suited for mobile one to one communication because Trafic is low and mostly 1 to 1. But I fail tu understand why anyone would think it would be a good idea for an IRC cliente.
There’s no fixation: you can enable the denser ‘compact mode’ which matches your description of a traditional compact text with inline nickname: https://i.imgur.com/VIQjXBt.png
I’ve been using revolution IRC so far, but the network disruption promises definitely make me curious.
Did anybody use this on iOS? The description says:
I’m in charge of the publication of Goguma on iOS. We have an issue tracking all the features not available yet on iOS: https://todo.sr.ht/~emersion/goguma/138
We are still working on notification support, as iOS has strict requirements for background tasks. Besides that, it works decently well and has good accessibility.
Palaver has protocol to register how to send push messages for iOS. Maybe implementing something like that would be helpful.
https://github.com/cocodelabs/palaver-irc-capability
Had a look at it: their extension is unfortunately just sending requests to a closed source API that they host, which is supposedly doing the actual APNS requests :(
It seems that there is source for API, but nothing prevents anyone from reimplementing that API independently.