QLirc IRC Chat Client

[dilwyn]

Thank you everyone, all suggestions noted, and I have a few ideas of my own.

Reading up now on IRC clients etc in the various RFC's and so on, to make sure I don't accidentally "break the rules".

I know the the use of IRC in general has gone down in recent years (messaging apps, social media etc) - does anyone use some other vaguely relevant IRC systems to chat now, such as Spectrum or ZX80/81 groups? Might give me an incentive to enhance the program a little.

Probably a bit early as yet for this to dream of becoming a general IRC client, but I can dream and this has reawakened my urge to write more QL software.

[RalfR]

There is an old extension from TT to delete an entry in an array to make room for a new entry.

I'm curious. What toolkit do you mean?

It must have been of one of the early QUANTA TT disks. There was a little SuperBASIC text editor from TT called "sedit" (sic!) where an extension named "room_bin" was used. The same extension was also used in the (SuperBASIC based) editor from the McGrawhill Assembler suite.

With this extension, you get two keywords "MAKE_ROOM" and "TAKE_ROOM". With this, you can add or delete an entry in an array, here used for the text. "TAKE_ROOM" deletes an entry and shifts the rest above, giving an empty entry for the last one, "MAKE_ROOM" adds an entry (in between or wherever you want) and deletes the last entry of the array.

Was very useful for an array based text editor.

[badaman]

Thank you for the info Ralf R. Now I understand its usefulness.

Probably a bit early as yet for this to dream of becoming a general IRC client, but I can dream and this has reawakened my urge to write more QL software.

This is the best of these projects! Good luck!

[badaman]

QLirc: un cliente simple de IRC para emuladores de QL (in spanish)

[RalfR]

Thank you for the info Ralf R. Now I understand its usefulness.

I have the original source of this little editor and also the extension. I can post it here, if there is a demand.

[NormanDunbar]

SHIFT SPACE (and other >127 character codes) appears as unknown characters in the chat, so some degree of character translation (Unicode?) may be needed if it is to handle, say, accented characters.

Unicode? For the QL? I did that, well UTF8, recently (for certain values of "recently") in the Assembler eComic Issue 7. See https://github.com/NormanDunbar/QLAssem ... ag/Issue_7 for details. There's a much better version coming in Issue 8, courtesy of feedback from Marcel and Wolfgang.

Cheers,
Norm.

[swensont]

I guess I should have been following closer the updates on my own posting.

QLirc was meant to be a proof of concept. Luckily it was not all that hard to do. Adding features (scrolling back in text, other chat rooms) will take more work. As for the COUNT conflict, why is DBAS using such an obvious variable name?

Dilwyn is working on future features. I did not realize he was adding comments as I could have done that. Maybe it will help him learn the code.

All SSB code (_ssb) convert to SuperBasic (_bas) to run, so both versions will always be available.

Tim

[dilwyn]

A little progress report on QLirc.

Do bear in mind that Tim's original version was a working proof of concept. That will continue - it was a nicely written and easy to follow example of how to do IRC at its simplest level.

While my version is still dedicated to QLForum Online Chat while I develop it, I am making efforts to generalise the code and put in more options. Here is a list of changes made so far. The program is not tested enough yet to share here, I'll post a copy in a few days as I iron out the bugs I've introduced with the changes.

• Fully commented the code and added a bit of error trapping here and there (more to do).
  The text entry can now be longer than the one line of about 80 characters, via panning single line input.
  Word wrap for longer messages (a single message can be up to 512 characters under IRC, including CR+LF at end of line)
  User joined and user left messages.
  Highlighted own chat messages colour and highlight sound option if mentioned in a comment from other users.
  Forum daily topic displayed on entry.
  Colours, etc settable from variables at start of program, making it easier to customise.
  Display origin can be anywhere on a hi-res screen.
  Channel numbers used now opened with FOPEN type commands.
  Option to enter password in case QL Forum ever needs a password to join, or this becomes a more general IRC client.
  Option to log the chat to file (this is for testing and debugging, won't be in final version as it may be a privacy issue?)
  Code structure changed slightly to allow adding more user IRC /commands
  Adding limited UTF8 character set support (thanks to Norman Dunbar)

[NormanDunbar]

Sounds like Dilwyn is having fun!

That's what I like about the QL, it's still fun, even after all these years (1984 until 2020 is pretty good going if you ask me!)


Cheers,
Norm.

[RalfR]

Any news from Dilwyn? Would be nice for me to try this (for the first time) with QPC2.