App::Alice - an Altogether Lovely Internet Chatting Experience
arthur:~ leedo$ alice
Location: http://localhost:8080/
Alice is an IRC client that is viewed in the web browser. Alice runs in the
background maintaining connections and collecting messages. When a browser
connects, it will display the 100 most recent messages for each channel, and
update with any new messages as they arrive.
Alice also logs messages to an SQLite database. These logs are searchable
through the web interface.
Installation will add a new `alice` command to start the alice server. When the
command is run it will start the daemon and print the URL to load in your
browser.
- -d --debug
- Print out additional debug information. Useful for
development or finding out if something is wrong.
- -p --port
- This will change the port that the HTTP server listens on.
The default port is 8080.
- -a --address
- This will change the IP address that the HTTP server
listens on. The default address is 127.0.0.1. That means alice only
accepts local connections by default. If you want to connect to alice
remotely you should change it to the IP you want to listen on, or 0.0.0.0
to listen on all addresses.
Most of alice can be configured through the web interface. There are two windows
that can be used to alter the configuration, Connections and Preferences. To
bring up either of these windows click the gear icon in the bottom right hand
corner of the page.
This
should bring up the new window. Some browsers (specifically Chrome)
will block this popup by default. If it doesn't appear make sure that you
allow popups!
The connection window is used to add or remove servers. It should be familiar if
you have ever used an IRC client (and I assume you have.)
The only difference of note is the "Avatar" field. In reality, this
field just sets the
realname. Alice abuses this field to get avatars
for users. If a user has an image URL or an email address as their realname,
alice will display the image next too their messages. This feature can be
disabled in the Preferences window.
The Preferences window can be used to set configuration options that are not
connection specific. You can toggle the use of avatars, timestamps, and
notifications. You can also edit a list of highlightable terms.
Some configuration options do not have a UI yet. The most notable of these
options is HTTP authentication. If you would like to use HTTP authentication,
you will have to edit your configuration file by hand. You can find this file
at ~/.alice/config.
The config is simply a perl hash. So, if you are familiar with perl it should
not be too intimidating. If you do not know perl, sorry! :)
You will need to add "user" and "pass" values to the
"auth" hash. The resulting section of configuration might look like
this:
'auth' => {
'user' => 'lee',
'pass' => 'mypassword',
},
- /j[oin] [-network] $channel
- Takes a channel name as an argument, and an optional
network flag. If no network flag is provided, it will use the network of
the current tab.
- /close
- Closes the current tab. If used in a channel it will also
part the channel.
/wc and /part are aliases for /close
- /clear
- This will clear the current tab's messages from your
browser. It will also clear the tab's message buffer so when you refresh
your browser the messages won't re-appear.
- /msg [-network] <nick> [<msg>]
- Takes a nick as an argument and an optional network flag.
If no network flag is provided, it will use the network of the current
tab. A third argument may be used for the message text. If no message text
is provided, a blank tab will be opened.
/query is an alias for /msg
- /whois [-force] <nick>
- Takes a nick as an argument and an optional force flag.
This will print some information about the supplied user. If the force
flag is provided, the information will be refreshed from the server.
- /quote <command>
- Sends a string as a raw message to the server.
/raw is an alias for /quote
- /t[opic] [<topic>]
- Takes an optional topic string. This will display the topic
for the current tab. If a string is supplied, it will attempt to update
the channel's topic. Only works in a channel.
- /n[ames] [-avatars]
- This will print a table of all of the nicks in the current
tab. An optional avatars flag can be provided to include avatars.
- /me <action>
- Sends a string as an action to the channel.
e.g. * lee hits clint with a large trout
- /w[indow] <number>
- Focus the provided tab number. Also accepts
"next" or "prev". The space after the w can be ommited
(e.g. /w4 to focus window 4.)
- /connect <network>
- Connect to a network. The network must be the name of a
server from the Connections window. If you are already connected to the
network it will do nothing.
- /disconnect <network>
- Disconnect from a network. The network must be the name of
a server from the Connections window. This command will also stop any
reconnect timers for that network.
- /ignore <nick>
- Ignore any nick that matches the one provided. This
applies across all networks.
- /ignores
- List all active ignored nicks.
- /unignore <nick>
- Unignore a nick.
If you get a message with your nick in the body while no browsers are connected,
a notification will be sent using either Growl (if running on OS X) or
libnotify (on Linux.)
You can add additional patterns to highlight in the Preferences window.
If you are using Fluid.app (a SSB for OS X) or Chrome you can also get
notifications when the window is unfocused.
Alice has an iPhone style sheet, but it may work in other mobile browsers as
well. Any help or bug reports would be much appreciated.
Copyright 2010 by Lee Aylward <
[email protected]>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.