IRC

Internet Relay Chat Protocol , or IRC, originally developed in Finland by Jarkko Oikarinen for use in the university network, is a protocol for interactive messenging between Internet users.

Reference

irc.org

the original home of IRC

irchelp.org

the website of 30 or so volunteers who run the #IRChelp channel on EFnet and IRCnet

How to write eggdrop scripts that won't choke on special characters (alternate ), by Peterre

A valuable tutorial that's more rigorous than much IRC programming. See also Writing Tcl scripts for eggdrop.

Internet Relay Chat information

A collection of useful links.

Tools

Tcllib IRC

IRC Client Class

Tcl channels on IRC

Libera.Chat

#tcl employs ijchain, which bridges the Tcler's Chat to IRC. Probably the best area for Tcl-related chat. (Unless you're talking Eggdrop). Also bridged to Tcl Chatroom and Matrix

EFnet

#eggtcl for eggdrop scripters, and #tcl (the intelligent crowd will wake up if you ask something interesting)

DALnet

#tcl (eggdrop), #tcltk

QuakeNet

#tcl

Tcl IRC Servers

Tcl IrCd, by Salvatore Sanfilippo

a pure Tcl IRC server under the BSD license

SorIRCd, by ronsor

Another pure Tcl IRC server. Features "linking support that doesn't suck", K-lines, etc. Requires Tcl 8.6 or later.

Tcl IRC Clients

For some reason, Tcl/Tk seems to be quite popular among client authors - here are the ones I know about:

IRK , by Jacob Levy

Jacob Levy 2002-09-29: just in the concept stage, I'd call this code Alpha quality. If someone wanted to pick up where I left off... :)

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 SITE SAYS IN 02/2004: This Project Has Not Released Any Files

Note however that many SF.net projects work directly from the CVS repository without regular releases occuring. In this particular case, they have put nothing in their CVS repository either. Too bad - appears to be vaporware.

CNT Bot : democracy software for digital activists building flat, horizontal networks.

• Channel voting on operator commands
• Configurable voting thresholds (i.e. second, majority, unanimous)
• Creation of polls on arbitrary issues
• Yes/No or multiple choice-based options for polls and votes
• Election of instantly recallable delegates to send to other channels
• Ability to hold 'plenaries' (a.k.a. conferences) consisting of all members of all invited channels or only delegates of each invited channel
• Voting and passwords to control admission of new users into the channel
• Concept of 'vote timeout' and 'default vote' to move decisions forward when some users are missing or away

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Please do not use emailslinks, we get spam because of this, I remove the "@"'s for the other developers too... - phobie 05-05-23

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NOTE: Karl Lehenbauer, Neosoft's Tcl champion, has moved on to procplace. Contact him regarding the status of this software.

The most popular IRC clients are probably mirc for windows and xchat for Linux. Although XiRCON is most definitely the most scriptable windows client. A XiRCON clone is being built :) Jump to XiRCON-II

steveo offers that "the only decent *free* IRC client I have found for windows is roxirc".

[Trillian? GAIM?]

Misc

RS tried this little example to post one message to #tcl:

proc IRC msg {
    set fd [socket irc.freenode.org 6667]
    puts $fd "NICK tcltest"
    puts $fd "USER tcltest 0 - :my real name"
    puts $fd "JOIN #tcl"
    puts $fd "PRIVMSG #tcl :$msg"
    close $fd
}

... and to write a clock bot (that posts my local time every hour) is as easy using every:

every 3600000 {IRC [clock format [clock sec] -format %H:%M:%S]}

SS 2004-12-05: The following is a minimal Tk IRC client (44 lines of code) with the hardcoded server/channel info to enter the Tclers chat:

package require Tk

set ::server irc.freenode.org
set ::chan #tcl

text .text -width 50 -height 40
entry .cmd -width 50
grid .text
grid .cmd
bind .cmd <Return> usercommand

proc send str {
    puts $::fd $str
    flush $::fd
}

set ::fd [socket $::server 6667]
set ::me guest[expr {int(rand()*10000)}]

send "NICK $::me"
send "USER $::me 0 * :PicoIRC user"
send "JOIN $::chan"

fileevent $::fd readable recv

proc recv {} {
    gets $::fd line
    puts $line

    if {[regexp {:([^!]*)![^ ].* +PRIVMSG ([^ ].*) +:(.*)} $line -> \
|             | nick target msg]} { |

       .text insert end "<$nick> $msg\n"
       .text yview end
    }
}

proc usercommand {} {
    set cmd [.cmd get]
    .cmd delete 0 end
    .text insert end "<$::me> $cmd\n"
    .text yview end
    send "PRIVMSG $::chan :$cmd"
}

See picoIRC 0.2 for RS's variation on the above. Or minibot