WeeChat 4 | Hacker News Reader

WeeChat 4

blog.weechat.org

131 pointstodsacerdoti49 comments

Not to be confused with Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app WeChat, released in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

WeeChat, that the OP link is about had its first release in 2003. 8 years before WeChat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeeChat

At some point you just need to throw in the towel when it comes to brand recognition. WeChat is as ubiquitous as Google is in the west for one sixth of the world's population.

I'm sure the owner of a hypothetical pre-1998 product called "Googol" would have come to the same conclusion rather than opting to repeatedly parrot the same disclaimer whenever they discuss it with someone new.

It's a text-based IRC client, I'm not sure there is much brand recognition to be concerned about.

I don't think it's not about brand recognition, it's simply about avoiding confusion (I myself thought it was about Chinese chat).

If that confusion doesn't affect the creators or target users, why break existing recognition with the effort of a name change?

The brand "WeChat" is not as well known as you might think. In China, it's known as 微信 (Weixin), and most people in China have never heard of the WeChat brand.

I also think it's an understatement to call Weixin as ubiquitous as Google in China. There are alternatives to basically every Google service. In China, many times there is no alternative to Weixin. 支付宝 (Alipay) is sometimes a substitute, but in many cases only Weixin is supported. Want to order food at a chain restaurant? Want to buy tickets for a museum? Want to choose the song at a Karaoke bar? Need to fill out a customs exit form? Weixin is often the only option.

Isn’t QQ similar?

Not quite as common or popular but similar.

QQ is made by the same company as WeChat. It was like the last gen IM, with a desktop focused application and an accompanying social media (QQ Space, so you know what the inspiration was). They are still used nowadays but in a much more niche.

By using the same logic then CNBC (1996) should change their logo because Huawei (2006) decided to copy it.

I’m guessing with West you refer to the ~1 billion people that live in Western Europe + USA + Canada + Australia.

I constantly see in Hacker news that people react to news of Asian countries (China in particular) as if the only other alternative is “The west”. Most of the world is neither China nor the West, why are we stuck in this dichotomy? Does the rest of the world not matter?

For this topic in particular, Google is ubiquitous in most of the world (The west, but also Latinamerica, Africa, many places in Asia), so it’s not a West phenomenon

The funny thing is, I do know about WeeChat (the IRC client) and did use it in the past, but still thought the article was about WeChat (the Chinese messaging service) for a moment. I'm embarrassed!

Yeah at this point you just have to change the name. I would never use this just because I immediately assume it's a tool for Chinese government surveillance.

WeeChat is really an awesome IRC client. I've been using it daily for years. Before that I was mostly using ERC in Emacs. But WeeChat has a remote client features that makes it possible to have a headless WeeChat running in my server (in a docker container) and I can connect to it from a desktop, web, or android application.

The best web client I know is called Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org/) and it is excellent both on desktop and mobile browser.

The desktop app I sometimes use is KDE's Konversation (which requires an IRC relay rather than a WeeChat relay but WeeChat handles that too). On mobile there is a WeeChat Android app available on F-Droid which works perfectly.

> But WeeChat has a remote client features that makes it possible to have a headless WeeChat running in my server (in a docker container) and I can connect to it from a desktop, web, or android application.

You can do that with a BNC and use any client you desire

In my experience WeeChat is easier to setup and more robust in long term usage.

I've been using WeeChat for 7 years now, and I really like how it mixes reasonable defaults with configurability.

My two favorite features:

* smart filter to hide join/part messages from idle users

* an Android app that can connect to a running instance using the weechat relay protocol (tunneled over SSH), for a good mobile IRC experience

You can also connect over https - no need to tunnel over SSH on your phone.

> no need to tunnel over SSH on your phone.

With https/tls client certs dead(?) - I'd prefer exposing ssh with only public key access - to tunneling passwords over https...

Put something like HAProxy in front of it and let it terminate TLS for you. GlowingBear runs under nginx (with a LE cert), connects to HAProxy(with a LE cert) which connects to WeeChat.

Mutually authenticated via private keys?

No, why would you bother? It's IRC.

Mostly for any service listening on a public port. I suppose tailscale is another option.

If you have ssh access to a server you can run weechat on a screen/tmux and enable relay access. Then you can use the glowing bear to access it and have a much improved IRC experience! I'm using this setup for many years and am really happy with it.

I love IRC and I am particularly fond of terminal IRC clients. In an age when Twitter and reddit are destroying their own platforms its comforting to see a major release of something that by all accounts should be as dead as ICQ or AIM but persists through passion and pure force of will.

I recall using it with Bitlbee a little while, back in the old days when instant messaging were sane and they didn't shoved you apps down your throat because "privacy". It was great and it's nice they have kept going on.

Back when you could use 2 pages of instructions and write your own app in a leisurely day.

I clicked around the website on mobile and it seems to be missing the fairly critical 'about' or 'readme.md' page which describes what the project is or what it is used for. I'm sure it's an exciting project, but I'm not going to read about it unless I know what it is.

From the comments here I gather that it is an IRC client, but that should be one of the first lines displayed on the site. Also, what makes it different?

The link posted was to the dev blog, the actual website can be found at [0]. On the blog, the right side menu under "Links->WeeChat::home" also links to the website.

[0] - https://weechat.org/

With this particular linked page, it's just the change log.

The actual website is at https://weechat.org/.

I don’t know if this has changed since I last used WeeChat, but I really wish there was just a configuration file I could edit for all of the settings. Most of the settings seemed to involve command prompts and they don’t port well between machines or can use scan a file to see the changes and additions you've made. I want to stick it in my Nix config and set it up on new hardware with no fuss like I do with almost all my other programs.

There is a dot file directory .weechat/ that you can tinker with and update settings without using /set

If that's true, I'll need to give it another look to consolidate all these different protocols I'm using (IRC, XMPP, Matrix). It must have been the documentation is was reading that lead me to believe this.

I have used weechat for a long time, I manually edit config files

Actually, IMHO it's even better to experiment/adjust with /set - then just keep the config folder in git.

I used IRC 25 years ago.

What are some good channels and servers these days?

I use libera and oftc

I wish I could still use it with Slack...

you can, with wee_slack.py

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

Unless your BSOFH disables adding slack apps without their permission, and, well, their name says it all.

I tried searching Google for what BSOFH means, and your reply was on Page 1. Care to enlighten us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell is a good place to start on these satires.

"The phone rings. I thought I'd fixed that!"

Thank you! Parent comment said "BSOFH" instead of "BOFH", which explains why the wiki article you linked did not show up in Google.

Bastard Slack Operator From Hell is probably what they were going for.

Lol, actually know, I just thought it was BSystemsOFH, but slack sounds better!

You don't need to add wee_slack as a Slack app. It just needs your xoxc- API token, which can be stripped from a logged in browser session.

Wait, does that mean that anyone can use Weechat with Slack? I thought I had to add an integration (so it has to be validated by my company), and then the puppeting would show me as [bot] or something...

The integration exists entirely to give you easy access to a token. They can be received manually if you aren't allowed to add an integration. I grabbed one manually from work ~6 months ago and it still works after all this time.

For anyone who doesn't find the title very helpful: from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36464326

> It's a text-based IRC client

Reply on news.ycombinator.com