IRC and Emacs all the things

&gt; Not having a general text editor at your disposal for when you have to input&#x2F;manage loads of text is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in the toolbox.<p>Once I learned Emacs to the sufficient level, I felt that. Today, I can&#x27;t even imagine typing any text in anything else but Emacs. Having all the tools you need at your disposal - spellchecking, thesaurus, dictionary, word lookup, translation, etc., feels extremely empowering.<p>My work machine is a Mac. I have written this¹, mainly to integrate with Emacs. Whenever I need to type anything longer than four words, in any program, I use that. The idea is simple - to copy existing text, call emacsclient, it invokes a function that opens a buffer and pastes the text into it. Then you edit the text in Emacs, press dedicated key-sequence - it grabs the text, switches back to the program, pastes the text back in there. It works surprisingly well. I can for example, open Browser Dev Tools; invoke Emacs; switch to js-mode, have all the bells and whistles: syntax-highlighting, autocomplete, etc.; write some javascript; finish editing and it would paste the code back into the Dev Tools console.<p>Sometimes I use Linux with EXWM. When I first discovered it, I got very excited. Not because now I could manage all windows through Emacs, but mostly because EXWM can &quot;translate&quot; and &quot;simulate&quot; the keys. So, for example, you can use same key-sequences that you use on Mac, but they&#x27;d translate into Linux native keys. There&#x27;s no &quot;context switching&quot;, you don&#x27;t need to re-adapt to the keys all the time. It took me a few hours to learn EXWM and configure it, next day I wrote exwm-edit² Emacs package.<p>Being able to write any kind of text in your favorite editor is truly liberating. I highly recommend trying. Be warned though - it&#x27;s impossible to live without that later. The only reason I don&#x27;t much use Windows these days - because I haven&#x27;t yet figured out the way of doing this in Windows. Someday I will.<p>---<p>¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;spacehammer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;spacehammer</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;exwm-edit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;exwm-edit</a>

This is brilliant! Not so much for use of emacs or libpurple or bitlebee specifically for that matter (which are all fine)...Rather, what i find to be the coolest is the whole... &quot;I&#x27;m gonna use <i></i>my preferred<i></i> text editor to interact with the world&quot; approach! Some might say that this reduces outside systems into nothing more than an API-sort of layer, but honestly, I really like that; it helps with learning curves, general adoption, etc. Kudos!

Slack is working hard to prevent this kind of interoperability; the incentive for them is to push ahead on features, and being abstract-able behind bitlbee or libpurple impairs that. They have deprecated the API token (called a &quot;Legacy Token&quot; on their site) that bitlbee uses, and there&#x27;s a sunset date of May 5 2020.

For a more feature-full emacs IRC experience, I would recommend Circe[0]. It even supports showing images inline like slack.<p>If IRC in emacs is not your cup of tea, I would recommend the web client&#x2F;web server The Lounge[1], which as far as I&#x27;m concerned gives people everything they want out of slack, in IRC, but doesn&#x27;t lock you down to a proprietary protocol.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jorgenschaefer&#x2F;circe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jorgenschaefer&#x2F;circe</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thelounge&#x2F;thelounge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thelounge&#x2F;thelounge</a>

could also Matrix and Emacs all the things, just sayin’ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alphapapa&#x2F;matrix-client.el" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alphapapa&#x2F;matrix-client.el</a> :)

I&#x27;m using a similar setup and for similar reasons, particularly for XMPP, but finding it hard to recommend to others because of the awkward bits involved (and because not everyone uses&#x2F;prefers Emacs, of course). It&#x27;s mostly okay for basic textual messages over a stable connection, though even then an IRC client is likely to split outgoing messages assuming an IRC message length limit. But when it comes to anything more advanced (e.g., file transfer), less visible (e.g., proper connection closing), or requiring a more advanced UI, it leads to compromises at multiple stages: similarly to just bridging protocols in general, but with addition of bitlbee&#x2F;libpurple API restrictions.<p>Sometimes I wonder whether the situation would be better with specialized CLI IM clients running inside Emacs&#x27;s shell mode: it works well for telnet MUDs, at least.

The contrast level they used for the text in the article makes it too difficult to read.

I might recommend that people who have set up Discord or Slack or Matrix or whatever should set up their own IRC server to bridge with it, rather than the end user setting up their own.

Every 6 months or so I do the vim&lt;-&gt;sublime&lt;-&gt;emacs dance. I really want to like emacs and really believe in its central tenants.<p>Its not that it is hard, but I just can&#x27;t get over the fact that it seems to not work very well. Buggy, slow, bewildering documentation, fresh installs that are broken, it all wears me down.

Good ol&#x27; C-x M-c M-butterfly...