free, distributed and user-friendly IRC client with Twitter,
and XMPP/Jabber support for Linux, Windows and macOS
based on GNOME / GTK+
And here we go again! We're proud to announce the new version of Smuxi, release 1.0 "Finally". During the development, 20 bug reports and 10 feature requests in 285 commits were worked on.
Smuxi is celebrating its 10th anniversary! 10 years ago, Mirco Bauer made the first commit to the Smuxi source code repository and is still very committed to it. He started the Gnosmirc project in 2005 when the only way a 24/7 "always-on" experience with IRC meant you had to use a console based IRC client like bitchx, irssi or epic combined with screen and SSH. This looks very practical at first and is a powerful Unix-ish way of accomplishing that job, but it has the big downside that it doesn't integrate with a desktop environment like GNOME. A bit later the Gnosmirc project was renamed to Smuxi when the new code architecture allowed other frontend implementations besides the GNOME one. The ncurses/STFL based text frontend was later implemented and is considered stable and useful enough for day to day use, but still has some rough edges. WinForms and WPF frontends also exist but need more work to reach a usable state.
At this point Smuxi 1.0 contains all features that we could have imagined and even goes beyond with very advanced features like message patterns or language agnostic scripting.
One of the biggest drawbacks of the IRC protocol ever was that messages can't be retrieved from the IRC server because the IRC server is simply relaying messages to the connected clients. So, if an IRC client is freshly started and connects it starts to receive new messages, but all message you had received before are no longer available. This always made IRC in a way "volatile" unlike other communication systems like email where messages are relayed and stored on the client side. One common approach for IRC clients is to store log files in a text file. This is a simple feature and gives the user the possibility to read older conversations. Smuxi also supports text file logging like other IRC clients but it has a big user experience drawback as you need to open the file from the disk outside of the IRC client.
In Smuxi 1.0 messages sent and received are now stored on the disk in a way they can automatically be retrieved/loaded when you restart Smuxi. It is like you have never closed Smuxi! This feature was already available in Smuxi for some time as a technical preview and it used the Db4o object database, but we were never happy about the performance neither with the stability so it always stayed an optional feature you need to enable. This year we tried a new message buffer backend using the famous SQLite database and it works much faster and stable as a rock. So finally we can enable this feature by default because it just works and enhanced your experience. We hope you enjoy it.
Documentation of how you can change Smuxi message buffer backend and behavior can be found here.
For instructions how to convert your existing db4o history to SQLite can be found in the "smuxi-message-buffer tool" section.
This is a new commandline tool that allows you to convert and export the message history of Smuxi message buffer files. This can be used to convert your existing Db4o history to SQLite like this for example:
for DB_DB4O in $HOME/.local/share/smuxi/buffers/*/*/*/*.db4o; do
DB_SQLITE=${DB_DB4O/.db4o/.sqlite3}
smuxi-message-buffer convert $DB_DB4O $DB_SQLITE
done
Smuxi shouldn't be running when using this tool.
Smuxi 1.0 supports with the following new hook points:
The following new plugins are supported by Smuxi 1.0:
Contributors to this release are the following people:
Thank you very much for your contributions to Smuxi!
Want this? Go here and grab it right now!
Copyright © 2004 – 2016 Mirco Bauer
