Chat

ERC – Emacs Internet Relay Chat client

ERC is a powerful, modular, and extensible IRC client for Emacs. It supports multiple channel-buffers, nick completion, keyword highlighting, and more.

The software is written in Emacs Lisp. This makes it very easy to extend, customise and adapt ERC to your own personal style. A useful feature of ERC is that you can extend the set of commands available on your IRC prompt by writing your own short Emacs Lisp functions.

ERC maintains a separate buffer for each open IRC channel and direct conversation. A sophisticated mechanism is used to indicate activity in currently hidden buffers in the mode-line, called Channel Tracking.

Features include:

  • Works with both Emacs and XEmacs.
  • Multi channels / multi servers: every channel is put in a separate buffer; several IRC servers can be used simultaneously.
  • Queries: private conversations are treated as channels, and are put into private buffers.
  • Flood control.
  • Timestamps.
  • Join channels automatically.
  • Buttonize URLs, nicknames, and other text.
  • Wrap long lines.
  • Highlight or remove IRC control characters.
  • Highlight pals, fools, and other keywords.
  • Detect netsplits.
  • Complete nicknames and commands in a programmable fashion.
  • Make displayed lines read-only.
  • Input history.
  • Track channel activity in the mode-line.
  • Highlighting: some occurrences of words can be highlighted, therefore easing conversation tracking.
  • Notification: ERC can notify you that users are online.
  • Channel tracking: channels can be hidden and conversation continue in the background. You are notified when something is said in such a hidden channel.
  • Nick completion: ERC can complete words so as to ease the writing of nicknames.
  • History: past actions are kept in history rings for future use.
  • Multi languages: messages are multilingual and can be customized.
  • User scripting: users can load scripts (e.g. auto greeting scripts) at ERC startup.

Website: www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ERC
Support: Manual
Developer: Gergely Nagy, Adrian Aichner, Andreas Fuchs, Benjamin Drieu, and many others
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

ERC

Return to Console Based IRC Clients Home Page


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