ERC is an

Internet Relay Chat Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

(IRC) client integrated into

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of ...

. It is written in

Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs (a text editor family most commonly associated with GNU Emacs and XEmacs). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Ema ...

Features

ERC includes message

timestamp A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second. Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolut ...

ing, automatic channel joining,

flood control Flood control methods are used to reduce or prevent the detrimental effects of flood waters."Flood Control", MSN Encarta, 2008 (see below: Further reading). Flood relief methods are used to reduce the effects of flood waters or high water level ...

, and

auto-completion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

of nicks and commands. ERC can highlight nicks and text for conversation tracking, highlight and optionally remove

control character In computing and telecommunication, a control Character (computing), character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character encoding, character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band ...

s, and allows URLs, nicknames and text to be converted to buttons. It provides input history, and separate buffers per server and channel. Notifications include channel activity on the Emacs mode-line, user online status, and channel tracking of hidden conversations. ERC is multi-lingual, and provides auto-script loading at startup. ERC has a modular design, with many features implemented in "more than two dozen loadable modules" included in the default setup, such as ''autoaway'', ''fill'' (splits long lines), ''log'' (saves chat buffers), ''spelling'', ''bbdb'', which connects ERC to Emacs' BBDB for contact management, and ''replace'', which auto-replaces given text in messages. ERC supports SSL/ TLS for encrypted IRC communication.

History

According to the GNU project, ERC was first developed by Alexander L. Belikoff and Sergey Berezin. Berezin wrote that ERC was "originally written by Alexander L. Belikoff, then I improved it in many ways and promoted to version 2.0". The pair stopped development in 1999. Mario Lang wrote that as of 2001 ERC had been "apparently abandoned", so he and Alexander Schroeder adopted it and created the ERC

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

project. Berezin responded positively to news of the renewed effort and bestowed stewardship to the new developers; in the ensuing years, versions 2.1, 3, 4, 5, and 5.1 were released. ERC development moved from SourceForge to

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

in May 2006, and ERC was officially incorporated into Emacs release 22.1 on June 3, 2007. ERC development now takes place inside the Emacs source-code tree.

Related work

ERC is one of two IRC clients included in the Emacs distribution;

rcirc rcirc is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client written in Emacs Lisp. It is one of two IRC clients included in GNU Emacs since release 22.1, alongside ERC. Rcirc is "compact, written in a single file of less than 2,500 lines of code". It allocat ...

is the other. Circe and the "ascetic" ZenIRC are also Emacs-based IRC clients. According to its author, Circe incorporates ideas from ERC such as its ''activity tracker'' and others; it was developed as ERC became "difficult to debug and improve."

References

External links

ERC
at

EmacsWiki Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Erc (Irc Client) Free Internet Relay Chat clients Emacs modes

Features

History

Related work

See also

References

External links