DMDircthe intelligent IRC client

If you’re reading this via our website, you may have already noticed that DMDirc has undergone a small re-branding. We now use the tagline “the intelligent IRC client” across all the DMDirc sites (apart from the addons site which is undergoing an overhaul — you can take a sneak peak at what it’s going to be like over at the development site). This tagline has also found its way into the ‘About’ dialog in recent nightly builds.

Why “the intelligent IRC client”? Well, we think DMDirc’s built-in ‘intelligence’ is the most significant aspect that sets it apart from other clients. We’ve yet to see another IRC client that has tab-completion anywhere near the quality of DMDirc’s, or that parses links as well as we do. We have more enhancements coming for both of these areas, too, as well as plans to make other DMDirc features more ‘intelligent’.

While the two areas mentioned above may not seem ground-shatteringly important, they improve the usability of the client quite a lot. The difference they make is most noticeable when you use another IRC client, and find that you can no longer tab-complete command names, or that a link in the topic includes a closing quotation mark when you click on it, which means you have to do something extra (open the manual to look up the command name, manually copy the URL or modify it in the browser, etc) in order to do/find out what you want, instead of it just working.

DMDirc 0.6 (coming soon; we’re going to be pushing out an alpha version this weekend) features a lot of enhancements to the ‘intelligent’ aspects of DMDirc, some of which we’ve discussed previously. But, as always, we’d love to hear from you if you have any suggestions on how we could make DMDirc more intelligent. Feel free to leave a comment on this post, create a new issue on the issue tracker, join us in #DMDirc on Quakenet, or use the feedback form found in the Help menu in the client itself.

In DMDirc 0.5 we introduced a feature described in the release notes as “intelligent tab completion for commands” (introduced in this blog post), which allowed commands to tell the tab completer about the arguments that they’re expecting. In that incarnation, commands can specify a bunch of extra words to add, and can toggle whether the default tab completion targets (nicknames, channel names, command names) are used.

In DMDirc 0.6, we’ve taken this one step further. Commands can now specify exactly what group(s) of targets should be used - so, for example, the first argument of the /ctcp command will now only tab complete to nicknames and channel names (but not command names, as it would have done in DMDirc 0.5).

We’ve also added support for what I call “deferred intelligent tab completion”. This comes in to play with the half-dozen or so commands that take another command as one of their arguments, such as the /alias command, which takes an alias name and then a command to associate with that alias. So, say you want to create an alias to start a timer that will CTCP PING a certain person after five seconds. You type: /ali<tab> ping /tim<tab> 1 5 /ctcp Nickname <tab>. When you hit that final tab, DMDirc suggests eight standard CTCP types (PING, FINGER, VERSION, etc…), even though the CTCP command is in the middle of a much larger command. How’s that for intelligent tab completion?

As far as I’m aware, no other IRC client comes close to the intelligence of DMDirc 0.5’s tab completer, so DMDirc 0.6’s puts us leagues ahead of the competition in that respect. But, as ever, we’re eager to hear any feedback or suggestions that you might have - feel free to leave a comment here, drop by #DMDirc on Quakenet to talk to us, or use the “Send feedback” feature (available in the help menu) of DMDirc 0.5.5.