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nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore

I have dozens of friends and associates that I communicate with nearly exclusively on IRC. By nearly exclusively, I mean I might call them once every month or two, but I speak with them in IRC on a nearly daily basis. OFTC operates a ton of servers, and other outfits like freenode. Modern IRC is pretty feature rich; encryption, bouncers/relays, web-based clients, very rich native clients, and ANSI terminal clients (I use Irssi) are all supported.

Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?

Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.

How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.

can we please get back to arguing now?

Yeah, right after I finish beating Doom III by "I.D." software running on my "MAC".

I wouldn't be surprised if the poster pronounces daemon as "daymon" either. The geek ego sure seems to get in the way of learning how to pronounce things. It looks like devs these days will have to provide audio files to show how to pronounce their work.

*shakes his head at correct pronunciation deniers*

An unresponsive piece of glass? Oh please. Troll harder... Nice IRC client you maintain, I can see you are stuck in 90s, because computing has moved on. Even IRC clients have... (avid IRC'er since 94)

And don't forget to use your editor of choice in conjunction with that whole rigamarole ;).

vi users are real UNIX guys. "One task - one app - one purpose".
Emacs, well, they might be "unix guys", but they're not following the mantra that vi users are.

The same with irssi.
irssi1 is only an IRC client natively, but irssi2 will be emacs-style, in the sense that it does virtually anything in the broad field that it chose to specialize in.

Me? Well, I'm definately a vi user by heart. ...It's just that I prefer nano.

I suggest irssi, good on both gui and terminal. Very helpful community too

http://www.irssi.org/

Geez, all this whining about proprietary half-assed IM networks. Show people how to use irc! They can use it with GAIM or any other various GUI client. (Or text if they prefer.) It's been around for decades, anyone can run a server, there are a multitude of clients on every platform, and it's entirely open. You can transfer files, and even have stupid graphical smileys and sounds if you want (or filter them if you don't).

Seriously, if people want an "open IM network", fire up an irc server, give everyone GAIM or Google Messanger, and be done with the AOL angst.

I use bitlbee, an IRCd that talks to the major IM networks in text format. Access this in irssi (any tty irc client will do). Leave it running 24/7 on a server in a dtach (or screen) instance. Attach to it from anywhere on earth. See in the logs the time your buddies came and went, and any messages you missed. Chat from one machine, move to another and continue the conversation. At home on my LAN, I run the trigger script, and have it play sounds on all my PCs in the house when I get a message.

I use bitlbee, an IRCd that talks to the major IM networks in text format. Access this in irssi (any tty irc client will do). Leave it running 24/7 on a server in a dtach (or screen) instance. Attach to it from anywhere on earth. See in the logs the time your buddies came and went, and any messages you missed. Chat from one machine, move to another and continue the conversation. At home on my LAN, I run the trigger script, and have it play sounds on all my PCs in the house when I get a message.

I don't see the problem with users installing software in their $HOME. *nix users do that all the time. When I get a non priviledged account on a *nix box I'm glad I am able to install my favourite window manager and IRC client in my $HOME without having to bother the admin. If the admin doesn't want users to install stuff (why?), he just has to ask users to not do it and set the /home (and /tmp) partition noexec (yes I know it can be circumvented but if you really want to you can still install stuff as user on Windows too).

There is no reason for most applications to need administrative rights on installation (admitting the target directory is writable by the user).

I am very satisfied with a Series 60 version of Symbian Putty. It works great with my Nokia 6600 by using GPRS services of major Finnish cellular operators.

I can easily use Pine and Irssi in my Unix screen. Actually I've found that using the phone's own mail client is much clumsier.

Small screen of 6600 is surprisingly no problem. The only limitation is slow text input. T9 helps you to input fast normal text, but finding some special characters may take a while. The developers of Symbian Putty have been really helpful and actually added some special key shortcuts after my request.

Its possible to IRC semi-anonymous. Its possible to use encryption between IRC clients. Real Criminals know this ;)

It's not exactly the same as IMSmarter, but i've become a giant fan of bittlbee + irssi + screen.

Try bitlbee - an IRC to IM gateway. I've been using it for sometime and it's superb, I can use my favourite IRC client (irssi) to chat to everyone via an ssh session to my box at home, whatever server room I happen to be holed up in at the time.

irssi.

• shell: bash
• editor: vim
• email: mutt
• audio playback: cplay front-end
• mixer: aumix
• irc & im: irssi
  • im/irc gateway: bitlbee
• web browser: w3m
• p2p:
• • client:giFTcurs
  • daemon:giFT
• news aggregator: raggle

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).

CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.

For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.

I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.

When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.

For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)

-- Chris

For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).

CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.

For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.

I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.

When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.

For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)

-- Chris

And an fserv script for serving files on IRC. Nice one too, used it myself, know someone who runs a bot on it.

Moll.

irssi is where it's at ;)

Combined with screen, Naim is really nice for idling on AIM (to avoid missing IMs from people who are only awake when you sleep and such), and for switching computers without having to disconnect. The same convenience can be achieved using screen with an IRC client for IRC (I use Irssi).

Its much more convenient than GUI stuff when you switch computers a lot during the day. I can leave naim and irssi running in screen while I drive home from work and people can still IM me if they need to for those 30 minutes.

irssi is where it's at ;)

There's nothing paranoid about it. In fact, it's probably not paranoid enough - ever installed anything from code yourself? Ever thought to check the configure script?

irssi 0.8.4 backdoor

If you blindly run stuff you pull from the net, sooner or later you will pull down some malware, and then the fun begins.

Much better. I like my color filter. :)

On Linux or FreeBSD:
ratpoison, rxvt, irssi, Links/lynx/ELinks, nvi/vim/elvis or emacs.

On Windows:
Nothing - I don't install things on other people's computers.

> ...or at least make a Linux client

Many people would not like the idea of only being able to use a single binary-only client. If they built "google IM" on an existing protocol such as IRC or Jabber, then people would be much more likely to use it. Releasing protocol specifications in the case of a new protocol would also be a good reason for many people to start liking it.

> ...manage to get your friends off MSN...

That's what IRC is good for! Give them a nice client like X-Chat, irssi, or maybe even gaim, and there'll be no reason to use MSN/AIM/Yahoo IM.

I could easily imagine a productive environment based around GNU screen and a terminal-based editor, mail client, news client, and IM client. Throw in something like w3m, and other for images, its good.

Yup, that's pretty close to the way I've worked for most of the last year or two. For me it's screen, of course, along with:

• editor - vim,
• mail client - mutt,
• news client - tin,
• web client(s) - a combination of w3m, lynx, and wget for most downloading tasks,
• spreadsheet - sc, which is surprisingly useful,
• P2P client - mutella, though I think there are console options for other protocols,
• IM/IRC client - irssi along with the fantastic bitlbee (and if you haven't heard of bitlbee before, take a look).

...and then I use good 'ol ratpoison for my window manager in X for the occasions that I need graphics (ie. some web browsing, viewing PDFs, playing graphical games).

Strike that. In most cases, multi-tasking can be very counterproductive. Shell escapes and $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE is good enough.

It varies :-), though I agree generally speaking. I'm using KDE3.2beta at the moment for a bit of a change, though most of the action is still inside my screen(1) terminal(s). You do tend to (or at least I tend to) find yourself more productive when you don't have stray graphical bits and pieces around the place to distract you.

Of course if you need the GUI for your normal working environment (ie. you're developing a GUI app), then, well there's not much you can do but live with it. :)

fuck that bitchx noise.

real men use irssi. best irc client ever. it makes bx look like stock ircII.

Why the hell would anyone want menus for irc is beyond me... IRC is text, how do you input text? With a keyboard of course, so why move your hands to the mouse... So custom commands are imo much better than an ugly meny. I love the text/console based irssi since it's just the best one. Easy to script and can be customized a lot... And since it is run on the console I run it in a screen so I am just a ssh/PuTTY away from irc...

I have been chatting on IRC on my CDPD phone for years. But for a newer WAP phone, http://www.irssi.org/ has a wap module.

Just host your on webpage, its that easy.

For mail we have mutt, for IRC we have xchat or irssi or BX or epic, for composing we have vim. All highly flexible tools perfectly suitable for each job.

I bet you haven't tried to keep up with a conversation amount friends with about 300 emails in an hour with mail.yahoo.com

irssi
fragroute, dsniff, fragrouter
BitchX

This message says Recently there have been a spat of well publicized attacks against what I would consider to be the backbone of the open source movement - it's source code distribution system. Hackers have been penetrating people who download, say, OpenSSH and then compile it to use on their systems by trojaning OpenSSH itself. This strikes at the very HEART of Open Source by making the act of installing the software a weakness. Because Open Source has no one distribution point, there are many places for someone to verify if they want to install software securely. Because there are no vendors, the sites people download software from are usually not provided with a dedicated security staff.

This is serious, guys and gals. Use the source, Luke - but what if I can't trust the source any more? Open Source has to find a method to get around this problem; see this post.

actually, OpenSSH was not the first famous case of this "trojaned configure script" practice, a few that spring to mind are:

BitchX
fragroute
and irssi

Reading the docs briefly tells that this works by connecting through "proxies" before the actual servers. The proxies will provide the anonymity because they don't know what the transferred data is and servers don't know what the client's IP is, only the proxy's.

I guess this is fine as long as anonymity is all you want, but I don't see this getting mass attention. It's just yet another IRC network. Don't know about you but I'm sick of having different IRC networks, it'd be so much easier to just connect to "IRC" and be able to talk to everyone. Allowing everyone to run servers which all could talk to each others would effectively do this, just like SMTP protocol with emails. There's a few projects that have been meaning to do this, but none of them is anywhere close to a working implementation AFAIK.

Some links: irc+, irc++. Also jabber does pretty much the same, but it seems much more about instant messaging than containing all IRC's functionality.

I raised this via the mailing list a few months back - some emails were traded but nothing has come of it.

Many packages are signed these days - it virtually guarantees that the code you are downloading has not been modified by any third parties. You all remember the irssi , BitchX and openssh incidents right?

Trojaned gcc, anyone?

Actually, it does happen more often. irssi, the popular IRC client, was recently backdoored in the same way.

At this point I think we need to make the assumption that the problem is a bit more common than viewing these compromises individually would suggest, and perhaps these individual events can even be linked together.

And for the developers out there, I think it's time to check over all of your current distributed source tarballs.

I have been thinking something similiar to this to replace IRC servers. The current way of having lots of IRC networks is just annoying, everything would work so much more nicely if clients could just connect to "IRC" and talk to everyone.

I've written up some of my thoughts but haven't really gotten around to do any code, mostly because currently I'm not IRCing that much and have several other projects to do.

It is true that open source applications, being openly available on the internet and distributed in the same manner, are susceptible to backdooring and trojaning. Just look at IRSSI or FragRoute.

This risk factor is somewhat mitigated in commercial software, where the distribution is typically through CDs and other trusted media. Of course, someone can still somehow compromise a software developer's network, but it isn't exactly hanging out a sign saying "I'm the source code, hack me!" like the open source projects.

Just imagine, for a minute, how devastating it would be if Sourceforge was hacked and malicious code was inserted into a ton of the projects without anyone noticing for long enough that it could cause real damage? The danger is clear.

Ah, you mean something like the irssi backdoor?

Same thing happened with quite famous Irssi ircclient. Here's the scoop.

Decent IRC clients allow you to connect to several different servers at the same time. And yes there are decent textmode clients also like for example irssi which seems to also have plugin for this SILC stuff.

I've set up a page for this in http://irssi.org/dchat/, the current idea paper is a bit old however, the flood routing can't work with huge networks :) Dividing the network to smaller groups would be better.