 |
Geek Culture IRC client walkthrough: ShadowIRC 1.1 |
Site home | Geek Culture | |
 |
Home | IRC guide | IRC FAQ | Client walkthroughs | ||
|
Geek Culture IRC client walkthrough: ShadowIRC 1.1 |
Site home | Geek Culture | |
|
Home | IRC guide | IRC FAQ | Client walkthroughs | ||
The structure of this walkthrough, as with all of them, matches that of the IRC guide, providing more detailed information for the client in question. You may wish to consult with the glossary in the IRC guide for explanations of terminology not covered directly in the guide.
Availability: ShadowIRC 1.1 is available for Mac OS classic; an alpha version of ShadowIRC 2 for Mac OS X can be downloaded from SourceForge, however. This guide covers ShadowIRC 1.1 only.
When you launch ShadowIRC for the first time, you will be presented with the console and the inputline – like ircle, ShadowIRC defaults to a floating inputline – text and commands entered into it are directed to whatever window is frontmost.
 The inputline |
To set up ShadowIRC for SlashNET, you will need to go into the Preferences dialog and enter user and network details there:
 |
ShadowIRC mandates that you have settings entered in for exactly ten connections at any time, and you will notice that these come preset as Connection 1, Connection 2, etc. Sometimes, though, this list will come up blank, and you will want to cancel out of the Preferences dialog and call it up again such that the list appears. To provide settings for SlashNET, just take the settings for Connection 1 and put your own in their place, as shown above. A few notes on the options: ‘MOTD’ means “Message of the Day” – nothing of any interest and you may as well not elect to see it (less strange text to come up in the console). Invisible mode just means that spammers will have a harder time finding you, although I doubt that it matters (see under invisibility in the Guide for more details). Auto-connect on start-up is self-explanatory.
Next, select the Connection Actions page using the menu in the top-left corner of the dialog box, and enter in commands to join any channels you wish to enter when you connect, such as is shown below:
 |
ShadowIRC has some unhelpful default settings, so below are a few tips for changes to make to the settings; the text in bold refers to the names of the Preferences dialog pages in which the settings are found.
Text: Uncheck Display server pings in console, as this simply fills the console with pointless entries. You may wish to enable timestamps on messages too, if you like.
Miscellaneous: Select Save prefs and quit under When quitting ShadowIRC for convenience. You may want to check Require option key to scroll inputline buffer; pressing up and down arrow in the inputline lets you browse through all text entered to the channel so far, but up and down arrow are also used for moving the cursor to the beginning and end of the line respectively on a Mac, and if you make use of this, you won’t want those keys to recall previous items that you’ve entered. This setting requires the option key to be held down while pressing up and down arrow in order to recall previous items in the inputline.
Windows: If you want to have an inputline in each open window instead of a single floating one, check Put inputline in message windows. You will need to reload ShadowIRC for this to take effect. One advantage of keeping a floating inputline window is that the various pieces of text on the window’s status bar will invoke useful menus when clicked on.
Userlist: You will want to see the userlist for any channel you are in, so check Display userlist in channel windows. If you leave this unchecked, the userlist is a separate window that can be called up from the Window menu.
Once you are done, and have closed the Preferences dialog, you are ready to connect to SlashNET. You can either select SlashNET from the Open Connection submenu of the File menu, or you can click the SlashNET text on the inputline status bar, and perform a connect using the menu that appears, thus:
 |
Once you have successfully connected to SlasNET, any channels you set it to join will show up on the screen:
 |
You will notice three parts to the status bar in each window. For channel windows, this will consist of a menu pop-up button for useful menu items (you can see the same menu by ctrl-clicking in the window), the channel modes display, and the current topic. The channel mode display will read ‘T N’, for ‘topic locked’ and ‘no outside messsages’. The console window features two menu pop-up buttons (window and current connection), and a read-out of your current nick on the selected connection.
The Commands menu contains items for most common commands, including quite a few you won’t need to use. Selecting these menu items will simply type the command into the inputline for you, ready for you to fill in the channel name or nick. The menu also offers keyboard shortcuts for all the commands listed. Alternatively, you can option-click on a nick or channel name in the text, and display a set of options for what you selected. This menu can be customised using a special file.
 User context menu |
Plug-ins: ShadowIRC is plug-in extensible, and there are some useful plug-ins available – see the ShadowIRC plugins archive for a wide range of available plugins. The most useful ones are Completion11 and ChannelBar. (Apologies for not updating the ShadowIRC plugins page URL sooner)
Away status: ShadowIRC marks users who are away with parentheses around their name in the userlist.
uilleann, 21st June 2004
Satellite pages maintained by Tut-an-Geek. Originally created by uilleann.