tiny - Yet another console IRC client

tiny is an IRC client written in Rust.

Features

• Clean UI: consecutive join/part/quit messages are shown in a single line, time stamps for a message is omitted if it's the same as the message before.

• All mentions to the user are collected in a "mentions" tab, including server and channel information. "mentions" tab solves the problem of missing mentions to you in channels after hours of inactivity.

• Mentions to the user in a channel is highlighted (the channel tab is also highlighted in the tab list)

• Simple config file format for automatically connecting to servers, joining channels, registering the nickname etc. See configuration section below.

• Nick tab-completion in channels

• Nicks in channels are colored.

• Disconnect detection and automatic reconnects. You can keep tiny running on your laptop and it automatically reconnects after a sleep etc.

• Key bindings inspired by terminal emulators and vim. See key bindings section below.

Installation

Install the Rust nightly toolchain, clone the repo, and run cargo install (or cargo install --force if you already have an older version installed). There's currently no way to publish a crate on crates.io without publishing all the dependencies, so tiny won't be on crates.io for a while.

tiny is tested on Linux and OSX.

Configuration

When tiny couldn't find a config file at ~/.tinyrc.yml it creates one with some defaults and exits. Edit that file before re-running tiny to change the defaults. If you want to create the file yourself, the default file looks like this:

# Servers to auto-connect
servers:
    - addr: irc.mozilla.org
      port: 6667
      hostname: yourhost
      realname: yourname
      nicks: [tiny_user]
      auto_cmds:
          - 'msg NickServ identify hunter2'
          - 'join #tiny'

# Defaults used when connecting to servers via the /connect command
defaults:
    nicks: [tiny_user]
    hostname: yourhost
    realname: yourname
    auto_cmds: []

# Where to put log files
log_dir: '/home/user/tiny_logs'

Key bindings

• C-a/C-e to move cursor beginning/end in the input field

• C-k for deleting rest of the line

• C-w for deleting a word

• C-left/C-right for moving one word backward/forward

• page up/page down or shift-up/shift-down or for scrolling

• C-n/C-p for next/previous tab

• C-c enter to quit.

Commands

Commands start with / character.

• /msg <nick> <message>: Send a message to a user. Creates a new tab.

• /join <channel>: Join to a channel

• /close: close the current tab. Leaves the channel if the current tab is a channel. Leaves the server if the tab is a server.

• /connect <hostname>:<port>: Connect to a server. Uses defaults in the config file for nick, realname, hostname and auto cmds.

• /connect: Reconnect to the current server. Use if you don't want to wait tiny to reconnect automatically after a connectivity problem.

• /away <msg>: Set away status

• /away: Remove away status

• /nick <nick>: Change nick

• /reload: Reloads theme configuration. Right now only tab styles and exit dialog styles changes immediately.

Development

tiny is in early stages of development. Some of features that you might think are essential may be missing. Please open an issue for those features (or even better, a pull request!).

Being a Rust n00b, I spent a lot of time trying to convince borrow checker, failing at that, and either adding bunch of ugly hacks (e.g. instead a loop that modifies single element implementing a loop that finds an index and modifying that index after the loop), or using a simpler but less efficient code (e.g. cloning things redundantly to avoid borrow checking). Still, I think the connection manager (conn.rs) and UI parts (tui module) are not too bad. Mess is mostly in lib.rs which implements the main logic (command and message handling etc.).

Any suggestions / code reviews / pull requests are very welcome!

If you're looking to contribute, see TODOs below. If you don't know where to start, open an issue and I'd love to help.

TODOs

• Paste events are currently ignored. A simple paste support that just sends whatever is in the clipboard could be implemented in a few lines of code, but we should probably be careful with sending long message and messages with newlines in it. I'm thinking maybe in these cases we should open up $EDITOR and let the user see and edit what they're pasting.

• Logging should be improved. Currently messages are logged in raw form in <log dir>/server_raw.log, but outgoing message are not logged. Channel logs are printed in a weird format etc.

• Colors are not easily configurable. All colors are specified in config.rs but that requires recompiling tiny after a change. We should move colors config to the configuration file. (and maybe even implement a "reload" command to live reloading color changes)

• SSL support

• There's currently no way to see all nicks in a channel. (currently to see if someone's online in a channel you can do <nick><TAB> and see if auto completion works)

• Sockets are immediately read when they're ready for reading, but for writing we don't check if they're ready for writing. Thus, if you try to spam a channel or something, you'd probably get a EAGAIN and tiny would interpret that as a connectivity problem and try to reconnect. We should buffer outgoing messages and only send them when the socket is ready for writing.

• Only a small subset of IRC messages are implemented. I don't moderate channels, so my needs are simple. For moderation commands or other commands that tiny currently doesn't support, maybe we should implement a "send raw message" command so that any user can directly send an IRC message to a server without any support from tiny.

• Implement away mode

• Implement system notification support for private messages and highlights. When to show (and maybe even how to show) a notification should be configurable as otherwise it may be annoying.