Show HN: Glowing Bear, a self-hosted web IRC front end for WeeChat

github.com

17 points·lorenzhs··5 comments

Hey HN! Glowing Bear has come up a few times in comment threads over the years, but with the Slack story on the front page, I thought now might be a good time to actually post a thread about it :)

Glowing Bear is a web frontend for WeeChat, a popular command-line IRC client (that also has Matrix support and lots of other nifty things). It's implemented in pure client-side javascript, so you can easily host it yourself or run it as an electron app (we provide build scripts for that, but no pre-built binaries). We also provide a hosted instance via GitHub Pages at https://www.glowing-bear.org. Since it's not an IRC client but rather a front-end for an IRC client, WeeChat (https://weechat.org/), you need to bring your own WeeChat instance.

With wee-slack, your Weechat installation can connect you to multiple Slacks at the same time. I use Weechat to connect to 3 different Slacks, and Glowing Bear to connect to the Weechat when I'm afraid from the commandline or on my phone. Works really well.

I struggle with managing hundred of channel after connecting slack accounts. Is can you tell how you did it?

Glowing Bear has a preference to hide channels that don't have any activity.

As for using wee-slack in Weechat, go.py helps. I bind it to meta-g, it's a script that lets you jump to channels by typing the name. Also, /part any channels you're not interested in.

In Glowing Bear, meta-g jumps to the search bar that filters buffers as you type. Now that I think about it, a fuzzy search with ranking would be a nice improvement to reduce the number of characters needed.

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