Limechat for mac I used Limechat for years because it's simple, fast, and functional. (Check out those lightning fast rejoin times!) It has every major function an advanced client needs from ZNC support to built-in network commands, with the exce. Textual is an IRC client created specifically for Mac OS X. It was designed with simplicity in mind. Textual has taken the best of IRC and built it into a single client. Textual provides many great features to make IRC more enjoyable: - iCloud sharing across all your devices.
Remote-shell protocols traditionally work by conveying a byte-stream from the server to the client, to be interpreted by the client's terminal. (This includes TELNET, RLOGIN, and SSH.) Mosh works differently and at a different layer. With Mosh, the server and client both maintain a snapshot of the current screen state. The problem becomes one of state-synchronization: getting the client to the most recent server-side screen as efficiently as possible. This is accomplished using a new protocol called the State Synchronization Protocol, for which Mosh is the first application. SSP runs over UDP, synchronizing the state of any object from one host to another. Datagrams are encrypted and authenticated using.
While SSP takes care of the networking protocol, it is the implementation of the object being synchronized that defines the ultimate semantics of the protocol. Roaming with SSP becomes easy: the client sends datagrams to the server with increasing sequence numbers, including a 'heartbeat' at least once every three seconds.
Every time the server receives an authentic packet from the client with a sequence number higher than any it has previously received, the IP source address of that packet becomes the server's new target for its outgoing packets. By doing roaming “statelessly” in this manner, roaming works in and out of NATs, even ones that may themselves be roaming.
Roaming works even when the client is not aware that its Internet-visible IP address has changed. The heartbeats allow Mosh to inform the user when it hasn't heard from the server in a while (unlike SSH, where users may be unaware of a dropped connection until they try to type).
Mosh runs two copies of SSP, one in each direction of the connection. The connection from client to server synchronizes an object that represents the keys typed by the user, and with TCP-like semantics. The connection from server to client synchronizes an object that represent the current screen state, and the goal is always to convey the client to the most recent server-side state, possibly skipping intermediate frames.
Because SSP works at the object layer and can control the rate of synchronization (in other words, the frame rate), it does not need to send every byte it receives from the application. That means Mosh can regulate the frames so as not to fill up network buffers, retaining the responsiveness of the connection and making sure Control-C always works quickly. Protocols that must send every byte can't do this. Careful terminal emulation One benefit of working at the terminal layer was the opportunity to build a clean UTF-8 terminal emulator from scratch. Mosh fixes several Unicode bugs in existing terminals and in SSH, and was designed as a fresh start to try to be robust and correct even for pathological inputs.
Tricky unicode Only Mosh and the OS X Terminal correctly handle a Unicode combining character in the first column. Mosh Evil escape sequences Only Mosh and GNOME Terminal have a defensible rendering when Unicode mixes with an ECMA-48/ANSI escape sequence. The OS X Terminal unwisely tries to normalize its input before the vt500 state machine, causing it to misinterpret and become unusable after receiving the following input!. (This also means the OS X Terminal's interpretation of the incoming octet stream varies depending on how the incoming octets are split across TCP segments, because the normalization only looks ahead to available bytes.).
We earlier wrote that this misbehaving sequence 'crashes' the OS X Terminal.app. This was mistaken—instead, Terminal.app interprets the escape sequence as shutting off keyboard input, and because of an unrelated bug in Terminal.app, it is not possible for the user to restore keyboard input by resetting the terminal from the menu. Mosh gets this one right. Mosh sets IUTF8 In the POSIX framework, the kernel needs to know whether the user is typing in an 8-bit character set or in UTF-8, because in canonical mode (i.e. 'cooked' mode), the kernel needs to be able to delete a typed multibyte character sequence from an input buffer. On OS X and Linux, this is done with the 'IUTF8' termios flag.) (See ) Mosh sets the IUTF8 flag when possible and stubbornly refuses to start up unless the user has a UTF-8-clean environment.
SSH does not set the IUTF8 flag, which can lead to garbage in input buffers. Instant local echo and line editing The other major benefit of working at the terminal-emulation layer is that the Mosh client is free to scribble on the local screen without lasting consequence. We use this to implement intelligent local echo. The client runs a predictive model in the background of the server's behavior, hypothesizing that each keystroke will be echoed at the cursor location and that the backspace and left- and right-arrow keys will have their traditional effect. But only when a prediction is confirmed by the server are these effects actually shown to the user. (In addition, by default predictions are only displayed on high-delay connections or during a network “glitch.”) Predictions are done in epochs: when the user does something that might alter the echo behavior — like hit ESC or carriage return or an up- or down-arrow — Mosh goes back into making background predictions until a prediction from the new batch can be confirmed as correct. Thus, unlike previous attempts at local echo with TELNET and RLOGIN, Mosh's local echo can be used everywhere, even in full-screen programs like emacs and vi.
Real-world benefits We evaluated Mosh using traces contributed by six users, covering about 40 hours of real-world usage and including 9,986 total keystrokes. These traces included the timing and contents of all writes from the user to the host and vice versa. The users were asked to contribute 'typical, real-world sessions.' In practice, the traces include use of popular programs such as the bash shell and zsh shells, the alpine and mutt e-mail clients, the emacs and vim text editors, the irssi and barnowl chat clients, the links text-mode Web browser, and several programs unique to each user. To evaluate typical usage of a 'mobile' terminal, we replayed the traces over an otherwise unloaded Sprint commercial EV-DO (3G) cellular Internet connection in Cambridge, Mass.
A client-side process played the user portion of the traces, and a server-side process waited for the expected user input and then replied (in time) with the prerecorded server output. We speeded up long periods with no activity. The average round-trip time on the link was about half a second. We replayed the traces over two different transports, SSH and Mosh, and recorded the user interface response latency to each simulated user keystroke. The Mosh predictive algorithm was frozen prior to collecting the traces and was not adjusted in response to their contents or results.
Of course, IRC isn’t mentioned nearly as much as the other platforms, and if you do hear about it in the tech press, it’s usually because hackers have coordinated attacks using it. But despite the bad rap, it still has a lot to offer. (For more on attacks, see.) The one thing IRC has going for it is its longevity. It’s been around since the late 1980s, well before the World Wide Web became the for the internet. As the Foonetic network puts it on its: 'IRC was here before AIM and MSN and Twitter, and it will be here long after they're dead and gone.' IRC is also an open standard, and therefore doesn’t belong to anyone.
The protocol is defined as. That means anyone can read the specification and write a client or server program. This is a major departure from a platform like Facebook, where outside people are generally not allowed to make their own versions because it's owned by Facebook. Plus, since IRC is not owned by anybody, there’s no risk that the service will suddenly shut down if it runs out of money or it gets acquired, as has happened to several social media services.
(On the other hand, if the individual IRC server shuts down, there’s nothing much you can do about it unless it’s yours.). IRC provides another way of providing support that’s quite different from using the phone or other online methods. It’s also in real time, so you get answers almost immediately. Another advantage becomes apparent when you wander into IRC channels for projects (many of which are hosted on Freenode).
You can ask questions of the developers themselves, a major step up from tech support operators who've never even touched the code and are forced to follow a script. How To Get Onto IRC Step 1: Pick a Client To get onto IRC, the first thing you need is a client. There’s a real in terms of clients available. If there’s a computer capable of getting on the internet, chances are there’s an IRC client for it.
(You can even get a client for the!). Win a $100 Amazon Gift Card Help Us Improve by Completing a 2 Minute Survey We would love to hear your thoughts or feedback to help us improve.
Please fill out our 2 minute survey below and you could win a $100 Amazon Gift Card! Here are some of the major ones for modern platforms.: This is the premier client for. MIRC has been in development since the '90s and has a lot of great features, like a for automating routine tasks. Unlike many other clients that are free, mIRC is. It’s free for 30 days, but if you want to keep using it, it’s going to cost a one-time payment of $20, which isn’t too bad.: On the Mac side, this is an elegant client.
Like many other IRC clients, it’s free and open source. You can choose from many styles for your chat window.
You can also get it for, but in this case you have to pay for it.: and users won’t be left out in the cold, since this is the platform on which IRC originated. In the Linux world, XChat is the graphical client of choice. It’s also available for Mac OS X (in an unofficial version) and Windows.: For Unix and Linux die-hards, this is often the text-based client of choice. Although its looks might betray its claim to be 'the client of the future,' it’s a fast and flexible client.
![Client Client](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125496448/380585769.png)
One advantage the text-based clients have over is that they work with programs like GNU Screen and tmux. You can log in via to a remote machine, start tmux or Screen, and start Irssi.
If you detach your session, log out and log in from another computer, your session will be waiting for you.: If you truly insist on using a, you can use Mibbit. The advantage of doing it this way is that you avoid having to install anything and your settings will follow you from machine to machine. This makes it a user-friendly alternative to the tmux/GNU Screen/Irssi solution mentioned above. You can also access Yahoo Chat and Twitter.: One of the great things about is how many add-ons you can use to customize the browser. Yes, there’s an IRC client for Firefox as well. It’s called ChatZilla.
It used to be standard with the original Mozilla suite, and it’s still part of the Seamonkey suite. IRC functionality is also built into several major clients, like Trillian, Pidgin and Adium. Step 2: Pick a Network, Server and Channel After you pick a client, the next step is to pick a network, a server and a channel. If you’re interested in contributing to an open-source project or getting support, is your best bet. This IRC network specializes in peer-directed projects. Runs its official channels there.
The Wikimedia Foundation also hosts channels for its various projects, including in all of its languages, there. (For more on Ubuntu, see ) There are other major networks, including, and others, but you’re going to have to dig. IRC tends a be a rough neighborhood in internet terms.
You’ll see a list of servers you can connect to on the network’s home page. The networks typically also have a 'round-robin' server that will connect you to a random server in the network. This is often a good choice, because servers occasionally go down, and this way you’ll always be connected to a good server.
Alternatively, you can pick a server that’s geographically closest to you. You’ll also need to pick a nickname. Most networks have software that will let you register a nickname with a password, and most clients are pretty smart about saving it for you. Then you’ll need to pick a channel. You can type '/list' into your client, but a lot of servers with lots of channels consider it abuse. The larger networks usually have searchable channel lists.
Most of the channels start with a '#', so Ubuntu would be '#ubuntu,' for example. To join, type '/join #ubuntu.' Graphical clients have clickable channel lists. Being a Good Citizen When you first enter a channel, it’s best to just sit there and absorb the general tone of the conversation before immediately jumping in.
You should stay on topic when you do decide to speak up. The people running support and discussion channels are doing it for a reason, and off-topic conversation is often a distraction. On the other hand, IRC channels tend to be very informal, and people still love to banter while they’re chasing down bugs. It also helps if you’ve read the documentation, FAQs and other information so that support personnel don’t have to repeat themselves. Finally, whatever you do, don’t flood the channel. That means to repeat the same line over and over again. If you do this, you’ll get kicked out or even banned from that channel.
If you don’t get an answer immediately, be patient. The channels are run by volunteers, and they’re usually busy. IRC is an internet protocol for real-time communication online. Although many fancier chat applications have appeared since it emerged way back in the 1980s, IRC is still going strong, and provides a viable alternative. If you want more information on IRC, is a good resource. I hope this article has given you enough information and whetted your appetite to get started!