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Overview

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.

Getting Started with XiRCON

Availability: Windows.

When you launch XiRCON, you are presented with an empty window. To connect to an IRC server, select Connect from the Server menu, or click the Connect button on the toolbar:

Connect

This will show the Connect dialog, which is initially empty:

Connect settings

XiRCON doesn’t ship with any information about IRC networks or servers, so you will need to provide this. You will need to add a server, so right-click on the Servers box (as shown above), and click Add. In the dialog box that comes up, type in the name of the network the server is on (SlashNET), and the name of a server on SlashNET; in the example below, the generic irc.slashnet.org server is used.

Adding a server

The next stage is to fill in the remaining details in the Connect dialog box. The Description field is what is normally called Real Name in most clients, and thus I entered my real name into it in the example, but you can put any description or other information that you choose. You can also check Invisible User Mode, to avoid receiving unsolicited private messages (see the Guide under invisibility for further details).

Connect settings

The Connect To drop-down menu, which contains which server you want to connect to, should have your chosen server selected, so once you have finished entering your details, click OK to connect. In future, you can reconnect to the server either using Server > Connect or the Connect toolbar button, or by selecting the server from the server menu’s recent servers list directly, thus:

Once you start the connection process, the console window appears, and you can watch server info appear as you connect.

The console

Using XiRCON

Getting accustomed to XiRCON

The basic settings for XiRCON don’t seem to support setting actions to take place (including joining channels) on start-up, so you will need to join your favourite channels manually. You can either issue join commands, such as /join #joyoftech, or use the Join Channel dialog box (select Join Channel from the Tools menu). This dialog box lets you type in the name of a channel to join, or select a channel from a list of all the channels which you have joined in the past. You can hold the ctrl key and select multiple channels to join at once, if you want.

The Join Channel dialog

Below is how XiRCON looks with a channel open. Note the button bar at the bottom for open windows, and the red highlight on the channel window and button – this indicates that new text has been sent to the channel. Apparently, the highlight is green when new text has been sent to a channel when it is not selected, and red when text has arrived in the selected channel, but below where you are currently reading when you are scrolled up.

#joyoftech in XiRCON (click to see it full-size)

Notice that the channel mode (nt) and the topic are both displayed in the window’s title bar.

Command equivalents

XiRCON provides a Tools menu, and a toolbar, for user interface equivalents to IRC commands, although I don’t know how they behave. It also provides a context menu for the userlist – right-click on a user for a set of commands.

Userlist context menu

Hints, tips and tricks

If you select text from left to right, then it gets copied into the clipboard automatically for you.

uilleann, siggy and hagbard, Smegedinashed, 22nd June 2003