I rarely waste time on introducing topics. Let’s get cracking. I am excited about this.

So, HexChat is a popular IRC client available for both It’s good we all know that, yet I feel we are probably not using it to its full potential. HexChat can be very powerful if used right equipped with bouncers, it’s quite formidable. Let’s begin

What?

HexChat is an IRC client based on XChat, which is now out of development. This (Mine) looks somewhat like this. It’s pretty old school, just text nothing more.

Honest Features

Easy to use (Ehh – not for everyone) and a customizable interface. I liked it a lot because I can customize it.
Cross-platform on Windows and Unix-like OSes. Damn, right it is.
Highly scriptable with Lua, Python, and Perl. Yes, you can even customize the bootup and other cool stuff.
Translated in multiple languages, Fully open source and actively developed
Multi-network with auto-connect, join and identify. True it’s pretty reliable.
Spellcheck, Proxies, SASL, DCC support. I really like the spellcheck and the personal message functionality.

Where?

Get it here, from their official website, for Windows, and for Ubuntu (Given below)
For other distributions, a simple Google search would do.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/hexchat-stable
sudo apt update && sudo apt install hexchat

How?

So, for starting and initializing. I would suggest going over this once. http://hexchat.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.html I rarely liked reinventing the wheel once again, hence I like to provide links for everything and suggest improvements wherever necessary.

So in the start, as you see the HexChat Network List. Do select “Skip Network List on Startup” box. This gets irritating and slows startup. Everything pretty basic.
Along with this, the next screen is pretty important. If you want setup bouncers then it can be done here. Refer this blog Bouncers on IRC.
By 2, you would understand which boxes to tick correctly. I would like to point your attention to autojoin channels. I like to put in the channels, I usually sign into. Hence not worrying about inputting channel names again and again.
Connect commands is also great. You can use this to automatically identify yourself. Leading to no problems with someone stealing your nick ( Using /msg nickserv identify my_password) or it being missing. Any and all startup commands can be entered here, which runs everytime HexChat boots.

That’s about it in that start. Tweak the preferences and explore Menus in HexChat to see what you love the most. There is an ocean of add-ons that can be added to HexChat as scripts.

Themes

Themes actually look good in Hexchat as no one really likes the clunky white color that it gives my default. My eyes get hurt reading from that. This is default window that comes up when Hexchat loads up in Windows.

Themes are available here with how to apply documentation here.

Features that you never knew about

The marker line is a very useful tool to keep track of what you have and have not read in a channel. If you exit or minimize your HexChat window then the Marker line gets inserted from the last message you saw. Pretty nifty right. Some won’t have this feature from the get-go. You should get it and also modify the behavior to their liking

HexChat has two shortcuts to reset the marker line also. Ctrl+M will reset the the marker line directly. Ctrl+Shift+M will scroll to where the marker was which is quite useful if you actually care about the scrollback.

ToR is a great tool but isn’t supported by other clients. HexChat offers full support for Tor as well, be sure to check out the documentation.
Remember telling you about Python Scripting in HexChat. You totally can. There are many things one could do, you can play with startup modules, executing commands and these. I think you can write bots as well if the channel you are in is very big or difficult to manage as such. You can check these for reference.
- https://github.com/sayanchowdhury/theb0t “Batul” used in #DGplug
- https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot
- https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/
- https://sopel.chat/

There I gave you a great idea for your next Python project. Say Thank you down in the comments.

The settings tab is a treasure waiting to be opened, check that out and tweak them but if you break them. You can look through my dotfiles for easy reference of the same – https://github.com/vipulgupta2048/dotvfiles/tree/master/hexchat
More can be found here – https://hexchat.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tips.html#

Well, I got nothing more. I will update this if I find something cool. Till then, Thank you for and Live in the Mix guys.

Update

Week 10

This week I was out on a vacation to Ladakh, blog coming out soon enough.
I already notified my mentors and org admin a week in advance and was in touch with the progress there only.
As much as I liked to take my system to Ladakh, I couldn’t. It’s really beautiful but got really less connectivity. It seemed out like a great detox, honestly.
So, I decided to come back to week 11 and dish out a lot of PR’s to keep me ahead in the week.

WEEK 11

So, for this week I wanted to fix as many activities that I could. Hence made about 15+ PR’s with more in the pipeline.
In regards of progress, with reference to https://github.com/rdrsadhu/beta-migration-script – I have activities till Implode in the pipeline.
Not stopping there, rdsadhu really helped me out by compiling a list of activities that are working but have no help pages. Intend to do them as well – About 15 of those.
Going over, I think I will complete the project this week or next, since my college has started.
As an extension I wanted to help out with the server, hence it would be a pleasure working on that as well, helping others with their work. Already talked with Octamois.
Blog for week 10 and 11 – https://mixstersite.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/hexchat-the-ultimate-guide-10-11/

HexChat: The Ultimate Guide #10/11