Comment by tsujp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsujp | Hacker News Reader

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    > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted.

Use a pastebin, there are plenty out there. See: https://paste.sr.ht/ or http://ix.io/ or https://paste.rs/ or https://bpa.st/ or https://gist.github.com/ or https://paste.ubuntu.com/ and many, many more.

Regardless of there being a better tool for syntax highlighting and holding small linkable snippets of code (so that logic doesn't need to be more to download when opening your chat) it also keeps it _out_ of the chat so it's not polluted. People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. So, link to the resource don't embed it.

    > I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be able to ping me

In the article you're responding to Drew directly mentions their suggestions for Push Notifications. I don't mean to sound facetious but, did you read this (article) in it's entirety?

    > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF

See above: link to the resource, don't embed it.

> People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing.

Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too.

This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet.

It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases.

I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine

The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise.

Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.

I think your expectations can easily be alleviated with the right IRC client. Most pastebins and image hosts use some form of markup so that if your IRC client was set to preview those links then it could, or even potentially cache those resources as well.

So what is this magical sufficiently smart client that can embed images from all major image hosts, code snippets from all major pastebins and also configures a bouncer for me and also lets me see messages on my phone without missing some as the phone OS killed it's network socket as it put the app to sleep?

I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was an introduction to the protocol written as part of building an Android client that was my side project at the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all managed it.

https://www.irccloud.com/

(Not affiliated, just a happy user.)

To be fair IRCCloud is not free nor open source. I believe there are other clients that offer similar functionality but it would be good to have something easy that does this readily available within open source

IRCCloud does much of this.

The Lounge will do all the above, minus uploading text to a pastebin (although there’s an open PR to add uploading large text as a file)

> Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services.

Sadly true. While I don't use IRC much, looking at older posts from fora without on-forum file storage and I just see photos roughly like this Imgur example (https://imgur.com/NOnf.jpg). Heck, even older HN posts suffer from the same problem.

For me it's not really about fast moving rooms or not, but that I want to see a bit of context to what was said. In IRC it's easy to see more than 60 lines back without having to scroll, but all modern alternatives don't have that as a concern at all. Have a few people paste code, liberal use of quoting for messages that are less than 10 lines up (so you are seeing the same message 3 times repeated on the screen), people posting images and you'll be lucky to even have a tiny fraction visible compared to the IRC view.

I can of course see the appeal of all those features, but at least for me it translates into a much worse UX in the end.

>I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too.

Discord does this already.

The users still on IRC have their heads stuck in the sand and insist every feature irc is missing is actually a good thing and that the users are wrong.

The users then use other services which have these features and the irc users claim some grand conspiracy to kill open protocols.

> Use a pastebin

That's not a solution, that's a bad and inconvenient workaround. Having to use an external service just to share a couple lines of code is horrible for usability. Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links.

>Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links.

I assume you're trying to say this is hypocritical, but it isn't.

The problem with multi-line messages becoming links is that the message is the context of the question. You have to reach for a browser just to read what the other person wanted to say.

Things like images and pastebins are ancillary to the message. You read the text part, decide whether you want to engage with it further, and then if you do you reach for a browser to see the image or pastebin.

Compare:

    <h> hey guys im trying to install blub on ubuntu but it keeps complaining that my splines aren't reticulated. full error here: https://paste.rs/id123

with:

    <h[m]> hey guys... (full message at https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/id123)

That last one is an actual example from an OFTC channel that's bridged to Matrix. It truncated at just two words because the original message had a newline after "guys".

Oh yeah, that's indeed not great. For messages with up to ~5 lines, the bridge actually just sends several messages, but as soon as the message has more lines than that, it only shows the first line as a preview. I could've sworn it actually sends the first couple lines, then a "(full message at ...)" message, but apparently not (anymore) - would probably be worth opening an issue for :)

The full message was longer than five lines.

There's nothing to file a bug about. The bridge does not (and can not without some AI or heuristics which are both fallible) know where the relevant part of the message ends and the log spew begins, so a message with a one-line description and fifty lines of logs is treated the same as a message with fifty-one lines.

Been using Sourcehut as my main repo host for like a year now, and didn't even know https://paste.sr.ht existed. Very handy. Thanks.

"All sourcehut services" on the web site doesn't show all services, alas.

I wonder what else is missing besides paste and chat there.

Edit: but the manual does: https://man.sr.ht/

is it not weird that you're responding to people who obviously know how to use irc and say "this is why i don't use it anymore" by trying to teach them how to do what everyone already knows how to do?

did you feel that you were offering solutions or something?

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