BarnOwl is a curses-based instant messenger client.
The software is forked from the ktools owl project.
BarnOwl is released under an open source license.
Key Features
- Supports Zephyr, Jabber, IRC, and Twitter.
- Expressive filter language that can be used to describe sets of messages. This language is used both for coloring messages and for selectively viewing subsets of your messages.
- Easily extensible and customizable through a Perl plugin interface. Available plugins:
- Alias – change the displayed name of select classes, for example to abbreviate long class names or to hide private class names from shoulder-surfers.
- ClassFilters – creates filters from files in the ~/.owl/classfilters directory.
- DevUtils – contains some utilities useful for BarnOwl plugin developers.
- ZStatus – exposes the zstatus and zbars commands, for sending status bars to Zephyr.
- ColorUtils – a module for BarnOwl to make managing color filters easy.
- Experimental support for the Zulip chat system. It supports:
- Sending and receiving zulip stream and personal messages (including
with multiple recipients, mostly-functionally). - Listing, adding, and removing subscriptions
- Minimal support for stream creatio.
- Full filter language support (message attributes are mostly the same
as zephyr) including support for “punt” and mostly-functional
smartfilter. - Support for displaying message edits (they show up as new messages
with the correct stream/topic/sender with the new text and opcode
EDIT).
- Sending and receiving zulip stream and personal messages (including
- Keyboard shortcuts.
BarnOwl currently requires the following Perl modules available from CPAN: AnyEvent, Class::Accessor, ExtUtils::Depends, Glib, Module::Install, PAR. The IRC module requires AnyEvent::IRC.
Website: barnowl.mit.edu
Support: GitHub code repository
Developer: Nelson Elhage and Alejandro Sedeno at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many other people have made contributions
License: 3-clause BSD license
BarnOwl is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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