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. (inspired by irc-core)

• 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.

• Configurable colors

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'

# Color theme based on 256 colors (if supported). Colors can be defined as color
# indices (0-255) or with their names.
#
# Accepted color names are:
# default (0), black (0), maroon (1), green (2), olive (3), navy (4),
# purple (5), teal (6), silver (7), gray (8), red (9), lime (10),
# yellow (11), blue (12), magenta (13), cyan (14), white (15)
#
# Attributes can be combined (e.g [bold, underline]), and valid values are bold
# and underline
colors:
    nick: [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ]

    clear:
        fg: default
        bg: default

    user_msg:
        fg: black
        bg: default

    err_msg:
        fg: black
        bg: maroon
        attrs: [bold]

    topic:
        fg: cyan
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    cursor:
        fg: black
        bg: default

    join:
        fg: lime
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    part:
        fg: maroon
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    nick_change:
        fg: lime
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    faded:
        fg: 242
        bg: default

    exit_dialogue:
        fg: default
        bg: navy

    highlight:
        fg: red
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    completion:
        fg: 84
        bg: default

    timestamp:
        fg: 242
        bg: default

    tab_active:
        fg: default
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

    tab_normal:
        fg: gray
        bg: default

    tab_new_msg:
        fg: purple
        bg: default

    tab_highlight:
        fg: red
        bg: default
        attrs: [bold]

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.

• alt-{1,9} switch to tab

• alt-0 switch to last tab

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

• /names: List all nicks in the current channel

• /reload: Reload configuration

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 ignored when string includes newline characters (\n). It'd be nice to use $EDITOR for editing multi-line pastes before sending.

• 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.

• 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)

• 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 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.