In previous posts, I mentioned that I was able to build and use an IRC client and wanted to dive a little more deeply into that.
I built ircII 2.8.2, the final release of the classic Unix irc client from which many newer clients were spawned. It is a painfully period correct piece of software for this machine. It compiled with gcc 3.0.4 without issue and, unlike my issue with the games, the install script put all the things in all the right places! In other words, a completely painless build and install process! On top of that, the resulting executable runs without issue.
I’m currently joined to 2 channels on a server and it’s using a scant 600k of memory. This is greatly appreciated on a machine with only 40 MB. For comparison, as I type this in VIM on the same machine, it’s using 1.8MB, yikes! Honestly though, this is the fun part about working on machine with limited resource, it actually kind of matters how memory hungry the software is.
On this machine, I can’t even load one my IMAP folders in PINE with 80K+ messages. Pine crashes with an Out of Memory error. I’m trying to figure out if I want to do an archive folder of that mailing list, and just have the incoming flow hit the filtered folder. But I digress.
The only real issue I’ve had with ircII is that the commands needed to use it are mind bendingly obtuse. The man page doesn’t really help outside of setting up a connection. The in program help…well, either I messed up the install or it just wasn’t in my source tarball, because it don’t work. If you’ve ever read The UNIX-HATERS handbook, THIS is what they’re talking about in the Documentation chapter. Commands that don’t make sense and aren’t really discoverable.
Eventually I was able to dig up a web page, where the commands were mostly documented, in a very terse fashion:
www.irchelp.org/clients/unix/ircii/commands/irciihelp/window/index.html
It turns out that doing a google search for “ircII commands” doesn’t really yield anything useful in the year 2025. Especially as the big search engines, have started largely ignoring quoting, and instead return results for irc clients that are NOT ircII.
I don’t believe what I wanted to do was terribly complicated. I wanted to join two channels on a server and be able to keep track of both reasonably at the same time. It took about 30 minutes of reading that webpage, and typing /window commands in to see what they actually did to come up with a simple (HA!) 5 line
.ircrc file to do exactly what I wanted.
SET NOVICE OFF #This lets you join more than one channel at a time
WINDOW NEW #This splits the screen in half horizontally
join #foo #This joins #foo in the top window
WINDOW GOTO 2 #This moves to the bottom window
join ##bar #this joins ##bar in the bottom window.
So yeah, now that I’ve been using it for a while, I’ve started to get the hang of it. I’ve moved on to some more advanced use, like hiding windows, swapping windows and moving windows. Catch me on irc.oftc.net, as mechanicjay — or mj_ultrix if I’m logged in from the ultrix box. If you’re really lucky I’ll even be able to figure out that you’ve messaged me!
