Customizing irchat.el

The simplest way to customize is through the defvars, that is, variables. You can place these either in your .emacs or in a special file. The most important defvars for getting irchat work the way you want it to are irchat-beep-on-bells and irchat-command-window-on-top, but there are many others.

The most used irchat variables follow, setting other variables requires deeper understanding of irchat and is not recommended.

• irchat-want-traditional: nil
  Currently only used on determing whether the commands-window is placed on bottom and to force regognition of old irc commands that start with /.
• irchat-server: from environment variable IRCSERVER
  Tells what irc server irchat tries to connect.
• irchat-service: from environment variable IRCPORT or 6667
  Tells in what port the server resides.
• irchat-nickname: from environment variable IRCNICK or your loginname
  What is your nickname in IRC.
• irchat-startup-channel: nil
  Channel you try to join when starting irchat.
• irchat-format-string: ">%s<"
  Format used when displaying your private messages to some person, person's name is inserted in place of %s.
• irchat-format-string1 "=%s="
  Format used when displaying private messages to you from some person, person's name is inserted in place of %s.
• irchat-format-string2 "<%s>"
  Format used when displaying messages to your primary channel, senders name is inserted in place of %s, sender is on this primary channel.
• irchat-format-string3 "<%s:%s>"
  Format used when displaying messages to some of your secondary channel, senders name is inserted in place of first %s, channel the message has arrived in place of second %s, sender is on this secondary channel.
• irchat-format-string4 "(%s)"
  Format used when displaying messages to your primary channel, senders name is inserted in place of %s, sender is NOT on this primary channel.
• irchat-format-string5 "(%s:%s)"
  Format used when displaying messages to some of your secondary channel, senders name is inserted in place of first %s, channel the message has arrived in place of second %s, sender is NOT on this secondary channel.
• irchat-nam-suffix: ""
  What suffix is to be added to every line you send. Not recommended to set, can be very annoying.
• irchat-beep-on-bells: nil
  What to do with arriving bells, if nil don't ring bell (or flash). If value is 'always always ring a bell when it arrives, other values mean that only bell us when bell arrives in private message to us.

Variables for controlling CTCP (Client-To-Client-Protocol) and irchat's own file transmission protocol.

• irchat-client-userinfo: "No userinfo given."
  What is given as userinfo for people requesting it from you.
• irchat-file-accept: nil
  Do we want to accept file transmissions from users.
• irchat-file-confirm-save: t
  Do we want irchat to ask us before it writes the file in our directory.

If you're not happy with the way the keys are set up, you may wish to modify the key bindings. This is most conveniently done by defining them in your irchat-Command-mode-hook.

There are lots of other hooks, one for each server reply and so forth. For every servers message the irchat first tries to run function named irchat-handle- 'message' -hook, if that returns true it won't run internal handler for that message. The definition of these functions is somewhat tricky, you have to define it via defun and then use setq to set its variable-value as this function, see provided example for details. With these, an auto-greeter, for example, would be trivial to write. Here is two examples of using hooks. First we set up irchat-Command-mode-hook to read our abbreviations and require our own hook-code if it is not yet loaded and then we set up autogreeter. BTW, auto-greeters are annoying most of the time.

(setq irchat-Command-mode-hook
      '(lambda ()
         (make-variable-buffer-local 'blink-matching-paren)
         (setq blink-matching-paren nil)
         (setq local-abbrev-table irchat-mode-abbrev-table)
         (abbrev-mode 1)
         (require 'irchat-hooks)
         ))

(defun irchat-join-hook (prefix rest)
  (cond
;;; do not greet people coming to channel #report
   ((and (not (string= prefix irchat-nickname))
	 (string= "#report" rest))
    t)
   ((and (string= "INSERT_YOUR_FAVOURITE_PERSON_HERE" prefix)
	 (string= irchat-current-channel rest))
;;; send the greeting as private message
    (irchat-Command-message prefix (format "Greetings %s" prefix)))
   (t nil)))
(setq irchat-join-hook (function irchat-join-hook))