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.
Key Features
- 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
Related Software
| Console IRC Clients | |
|---|---|
| WeeChat | Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat; very light and extensible |
| Irssi | Console based client supporting SILC and ICB protocols |
| glirc | Advanced client maintaining a model of the IRC connection state |
| tiny | Rust based IRC client |
| ERC | Powerful, modular, and extensible IRC client for Emacs |
| ScrollZ | Advanced ircII-based IRC client |
| ircc | A single C file which implements a usable IRC client |
| senpai | IRC client that works best with bouncers |
| EPIC | Based on ircII, EPIC excels at scripting |
| catgirl | Targets FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS and Linux |
| zuse | Sleek, minimal IRC client for your terminal. |
| rirc | Minimalistic IRC client |
| kirc | Tiny IRC client |
| Swirc | Console based ICB and IRC client |
| Xaric | irc client similar to (and forked from) BitchX and ircII |
| insomnia | Frontend for the hii IRC client |
| ii | Minimalist FIFO and filesystem-based IRC client |
| hii | File-based IRC client |
| Circada | Comes with two modes, normal chat mode and the navigation mode |
| BarnOwl | Forked from the ktools owl project |
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