[Erc-discuss] ERC thoughts, bugs, and wishlist

[Kashish Sharma]

Hi,

I'm new to Emacs, and ERC + Evil-mode is the IRC client I've always
wanted, tried to customize other clients to be like, but never had :D
The concept of having a common buffer for both input and for messages
is genius and something that has to be experienced to understand the
excellence of.

There are some issues I've noticed, though - in decreasing order of annoyance -

1. (what seems like) a bug - ERC seems to have issues with trailing
whitespace - if there is any, a blank line is sent after the intended
message (and these do get sent to the server). I'm not sure if the
whitespace is added by user error, though - a fair few times I was
quite certain that there was no trailing whitespace, but an extra
blank line was sent nevertheless. I suspect this may be caused by me
using Ctl-m for Enter, and/or by Evil-mode. ERC shouldn't behave this
way with trailing spaces, and if this is the result of a newline being
sent to the buffer...I feel those ought to be scrubbed from the input
by ERC, as no one ever really wants to send a newline in IRC.

2. (what seems like another bug -) Input history is lost if one
disconnects/reconnects.
Wishlist - input history remembered across Emacs sessions. Perhaps
with the option of setting the history size.

3. Messages are split into multiple lines (similar to Auto Fill mode),
timestamps appear in their own lines, and there is a blank line after
each message. These add up to - needlessly IMHO - not just show a lot
less information in the same area, but also to make it difficult to
copy text from the scrollback and logs for the purposes of quoting
etc.
Wishlist - A nice touch would be the ability to customize how text is
displayed - the order of placement of items (timestamp left, timestamp
right, text, etc) as well as anything else the user wants (e.g. the
extra newlines for those who like it the current way, which admittedly
does look extra-neat and readable). And, with the same intent, a way
to turn the ERC autofill on/off.

Other things that would be nice touches -
Input history remembering your unsent messages - e.g. if you enter
something but don't send it, then Alt-n/p to access earlier messages
and happen to resend one of them, the typed-but-unsent line is saved.
Similarly, if one types a line but does not send it, one should be
able to press Alt-n to get a new blank line to write in, with the
previous unsent message being saved as input history.
Syntax highlighting rules for ERC log files - something I've missed
while reading logs. If I was more knowledgeable, I'd cook these up
myself :\
Completely case-insensitive nick completion - f, fo, as well as FO etc
matching foo, Foo, FOO, FoO etc.

Thank you for reading :)
Kashish Sharma