As you can probably gather from DMDirc’s tagline, we like making DMDirc act intelligently. One of our latest set of changes revolves around intelligent handling of channel names. Say you join a channel and a friendly person advises you to try some others out for size:

<Person> Hey, you, why don't you join #channel2 (and maybe #channel3)?

DMDirc now applies the same intelligent linking algorithms we use for URLs to channel names, so we can intelligently figure out what was probably meant to be part of the channel name, and what was punctuation following it. With our new “stylechannels” option enabled, that message will show up as:

<Person> Hey, you, why don't you join #channel2 (and maybe #channel3)?

As you can see, we now correctly realise that the “)” and “?” at the end of #channel3 probably weren’t intended to be part of the channel name. And with stylechannels enabled you’ll be able to see exactly where you’re going to end up before clicking.

But we’re not done yet! What if you’re more of a keyboard aficionado than a mouse lover? You want to use the /join command, but don’t think there’s an easy way to get that channel name that was just mentioned without copying it by hand or resorting to the mouse? Think again – DMDirc now has intelligent tab completion for its /join command. This keeps an eye out for any linked channel names, and suggests any you’re not already in when you hit tab! So after our friendly user suggests two channels to us, we can type:

/join <tab>

And DMDirc will suggest #channel2 and #channel3. What’s more, if you decide you want to join multiple channels, recent upgrades to our tab completer allow the join command to offer useful suggestions if you comma-separate the channels:

/join #help,<tab>

Will offer the suggestions #help,#channel2 and #help,#channel3.

All of these features will be available in DMDirc 0.6.4, which should be out at the start of July. If you can’t wait that long, you can try a nightly build. Think of any more ways we can make DMDirc intelligent? Leave a comment, poke @DMDirc on Twitter, or you can of course join us on IRC.

We’ve just released DMDirc 0.6.3, which is our first release in 2010. From a development point of view, this release also marks the end of our support for Subversion. An overview of the changes included follows:

Window menu enhancement

The window menu now groups windows by server, making it much easier to quickly access a specific window (especially if you’re connected to lots of different servers!).

Addon browser

The addon browser was previously available in 0.6.3m2, but was not properly functioning in that release. DMDirc 0.6.3 presents a functioning addon browser, allowing you to browse through plugins, themes and action packs from within DMDirc, and download and install them with one click.

Backgrounds

You can now specify background images for both the textpane and the main ‘desktop’ area.

Topic improvements

A brand new topic bar now adorns the top of channel windows, allowing you to easily see the current topic at a glance, and edit it right from the channel. The topic history display in the channel settings window has also been completely revamped, showing much more detail than it did previously.

Improved URL and channel linking

DMDirc’s already intelligent URL handling has been improved further, now allowing some extra characters to ensure compatibility with non-standard URLs. We’ve also applied the same techniques we use for intelligent URL linking to channel name links, so trailing punctuation and brackets will no longer get in your way when trying to join a channel.

DCC fixes

We’ve fixed a whole raft of bugs in the DCC plugin, which should make it work much more reliably in more circumstances than ever before. We’ve also fixed a particularly silly bug which rate limited all DCCs to 10KB/s in past versions.

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We will also respond to mentions on twitter. DMDirc 0.6.3 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other java-capable platforms that are not specifically supported.