Is there any IRC client that supports VI keys? The ''obvious'' script VimIRC is and has been broken for so long it's not even funny.
Do you know any IRC clients on Linux, GUI or Curses, that provides some of that nice vi usability?
Or could some of the existing clients be scripted to use? Irssi, XChat, even ERC would do?
I use vim_mode.pl with
irssi (in GNU screen) and
am extremely satisfied with the
combination.
For anyone who doesn't know Irssi,
it's terminal-based and there is no
GUI available or planned. While this
may put some people off, it makes
for a great combination with GNU
screen, and allows you to keep
your connection while being logged
out: Always a good thing to have for
IRC and its erratic response times.
The current version of vim_mode is
already pretty sophisticated, has
registers, custom mappings and lots
of other stuff, and it's still being
developed.
To use vim_mode's ex mode,
you'll need the uberprompt.pl
script from
irssi-scripts/prompt_info
(same developers).
The most up-to-date documentation is
in the .pl file itself. If you
have further questions or
suggestions, the developers (and a
few of us lowly users) hang out on
#irssi_vim/Freenode and are
generally very friendly and
responsive.
An alternative solution would be to use the unixy bare-bones ii IRC client by the suckless community with Vim itself.
ii creates a directory structure in the file system and places FIFOs for channels and server messages that can be written to and read from.
On the ii page, you can find a link to a working setup that uses multitail for split windows, Vim for entry, and shell scripts and screen for glue.
Multitail can be configured to get (non-dynamic) highlighting for the IRC logs, and if you'd buffer the logs, you can use Vim's 'complete' option to get dynamic word completion from them.
ii mode would be quite perfect if I got vim somehow to do tail -f characteristics. But nothing usable has come around. TailBundle for instance ceases action after a while and so on... It would be perfect to get buffer word completion and omni completion for nicks, and vim's highlighting for the log. And one buffer per IRC channel. Wouldn't that be grand. I'm investigating to vim_mode.pl so perhaps it fills the needs better. Because irssi takes care of many issues that should otherwise be implemented (eg. splitlong, away toggle, ...)
– souser12345
Feb 14 '11 at 9:23
<Tab> and <C-n> to do different kinds of completion now), but haven't written a buffer completion function yet.
– souser12345
Jun 8 '11 at 17:44
Now that Emacs has more than decent Vi-key emulation package, Evil, ERC is a very viable solution for this. After a little tuning, chatting using ERC and Evil can be very vim experience.
Vim itself has an IRC plugin.
