Fixpoint

It is my distinct pleasure today to publish yrc version 95 Kelvin, the third public (and sixth absolute) release⁽ⁱ⁾ of JWRD's own simple yet increasingly usable IRC chat client for the Unix terminal environment.

The general theme is automation, of the boring and sensible sort: harnessing the brute speed and precision of the machine to reduce the need for repetitive manual tasks.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ As such, its headline features are as follows:

• Recall of previous lines from input history. This is a lifesaver in multiple error situations such as getting a command slightly wrong, sending a message when the network connection is interrupted, or inadvertently sending a message to a network status window which otherwise wouldn't even log it except to note the error.
• Word completion using Tab, drawing its options from the set of nicknames in current channel, joined channel names in current network, and yrc internal commands ("slash commands").
• Word-level cursor motion keys (back-word and forward-word).
• Bulk deletion ("kill") keys, both word-level and line-level, with a history of recent kills which serves for internal cut-and-paste functionality or simply for undoing an accidental kill.
• The /close-net command to disconnect from the current network if necessary and close out all its associated windows.
• The /reconnect command to force reconnection, as if by ping timeout, without losing runtime state such as modified nickname as happens with a /disconnect.

Its software requirements are unchanged: Python 2.6 or 2.7. In particular, no third-party "readline" library sneaks in to support the refined editing and history features; nonetheless the codebase size remains quite manageable at around 2750 total lines of Python, up a mere 350 from the last release.

This has been two and a half years in coming, a cold winter (perhaps befitting the state of the world altogether) which saw the program lose at least one useful user, the end of Freenode, minimal progress on vetting server software for self-hosting, and the continued decline in relevance of IRC as a whole.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ Nonetheless, we still use yrc on a daily basis here and it's featured in some variants of our technical training curriculum, so we owe it to ourselves and our clients at the very least to keep it moving along; besides, having known-good, comprehensible and comprehended code on hand to reference or build on in future projects couldn't possibly hurt.

The heavy coding itself took only about five working days, with further time going to testing, documentation, release engineering, structuring of the changes - originally done as fine-grained git commits - into a series of relatively coherent V patches for ease of reading, followed by signing and testing the patches and of course this writeup.

Downloads

This will be a dual-format release, including both the patches to support reading and further development as well as an archive for easy installation without demanding V tooling. Starting with that "easy" path:

yrc-95.tar.gz (38 kB), GPG signature.

Verify the signature, extract the tarball, enter the resulting "yrc-95" directory then view the README.txt file for the remaining installation instructions.

And for the expanded patch format:^(iv)

Changes

There were some further user-facing changes that came up, for instance to fit better with the new features, for general consistency, or to make room for future work. Here for your convenience is a reprint of the full summary from the NEWS file, excluding those new features already mentioned.

Command changes:

• /connect and /join now send focus to the target window (creating it as necessary).
• /join, /part and /disconnect no longer log the action to the server messages window, since their network-acknowledged effects are visible anyway in the appropriate places.
• /quit no longer takes a quit message, because it didn't work, and can't be made to work reliably without blocking client shutdown to wait for acknowledgement.
• /close now takes a part message, since it implies /part when used on a channel.
• /disconnect no longer takes a network name, always acting on the current window's network; this clears the way to letting it take a quit message instead at some point.
• Keyboard commands not intended as slash commands (eg cursor movement and scrolling) can no longer be sent by name from the prompt. (Conceptually, the two command types are now clearly distinguished by considering the leading slash as part of the name.)

Protocol changes:

• /nick now works also when unregistered, for servers seen in practice, by sending a fresh USER command along with the NICK. This helps when a nick is rejected on connect, such as when it's already in use.
• Reconnection becomes somewhat more aggressive as the initial delay drops from 4 seconds to 1, making for a more responsive /reconnect. (Singular vs. plural complications in the delay info message are avoided by abbreviating the "seconds" unit.)

Deprecated features:

• Command abbreviation (eg /c for /connect): please speak up now if you still find this beneficial even with tab completion.

Style:

• Switch to tab-based indent for manual.txt too.

Internals:

• Assorted refactoring, reordering and optimization.

The new key commands can be found in section 3.2.3 of the updated manual.txt (Keyboard commands - At the prompt).

1. Kelvin versioning counts downward, in something like an asymptotic process toward zero, by which point the product would be considered quite well frozen by any standard. Thus 96K was the previous release, from a start at 100K. [^]
2. This sits in contrast, for instance, to the trendy, "AI" sort of automation where one invites the machine to speak for oneself:

   dorion: on the topic of identifying bots in the wild, in one of the local swamps someone was pushing btc over lightning. I linked my sign of intelligence article. a friend in that room replied with a 10 point summary of the article. it was ok, but a little awkward. I later found out he had pasted the 'chatgpt' output of : summarize this article in 10 points.
   diana_coman: lolz, quite
   dorion: though awkward, I didn't suspect it was bot output since it was coming from a known entity.
   dorion: it made sense after he told me, but still caught me offguard.
   diana_coman: the saddest part being that on one hand that's what passes then as "normal" as in expected, an awkward summary being acceptable, and on the other hand that people consider that quite genuinely as "their contribution" and value added/effort offered as such
   diana_coman: if you pointed out the awkwardness of it or otherwise "rejected" it even in the nicest of terms, the very likely reaction/impression across the board would be that you are "unfriendly" at best
   diana_coman: not that there is a disservice really for everyone involved to provide automated summaries
   diana_coman: but at the end of the day, the environment is what it is and other than carving, maintaining and if need be protecting even a space for better interactions and habits, I don't see what else can one really do

   [^]

3. Both as an ongoing trend, and in the envisioned future with new possibilities emerging in the nascent Eulora2 environment. [^]
4. Speaking of automation, it looks like I could use a proper script for generating these tables already, though the codeview backend part is scripted at least. While we're at it, the descriptions from each manifest entry might be worth better highlighting, since they reflect real work done on summarizing each patch yet remain somewhat buried as things stand. [^]