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Hack 17 Automatic Completion of Nicknames

Your client does the typing so that you
don't have to.

Often when chatting on
IRC you spend much of your time just typing in
people's nicknames. This can get tedious, so many
clients have some kind of automatic completion facility that works
out whose nick you're trying to type and finishes
the job for you. This hack will explain the nick-completion
functionality provided in several popular IRC clients.

4.2.1 mIRC

mIRC provides basic tab-completion
functionality that will be familiar to anyone who's
used a modern command-line interface. Type the first letter or so of
a nickname and press the Tab key. mIRC will then complete the rest of
the nickname for you, as shown in Figure 4-1. If
more than one nick starts with the part that you typed, mIRC will
allow you to cycle through the available options by repeatedly
pressing the Tab key.

Figure 4-1. Tab completion in mIRC: before (left) and after (right) pressing Tab

4.2.2 irssi

irssi
provides tab-completion features similar to those found in mIRC. If
the nick you tab-complete is the first word in a message,
irssi assumes that you're
addressing someone, and automatically adds a colon to the end of the
nick. In addition, the concept of tab completion has been extended to
the rest of the irssi interface. You can see a
list of all user completions by entering
/completion.

4.2.3 XChat

XChat offers some more advanced
nick-completion features, which are configured in the Interface
Input Box page of the Preferences dialog. As with
irssi, if the nick you are trying to complete is
the first word of a line, XChat will assume that you are addressing
the person in question and add an optional suffix to the nick. By
default, this suffix is a comma, as shown in Figure 4-2. Unlike mIRC and irssi,
XChat does not cycle through options if more than one nick starts
with the character(s) you entered; instead, it displays all the
options and expects you to enter enough extra characters to eliminate
the ambiguity.

Figure 4-2. The XChat preferences for nick completion

XChat also has automatic nick completion, a feature that people
either love or hate: when it is turned on, any characters at the
start of a message that are followed by the nick-completion suffix
will be magically expanded when you press the Enter key. The
characters will expand into the first matching nick, alphabetically.
An example of how this works and the problems it can cause are shown
in Figure 4-3. Autocompletion can be enabled and
disabled in the XChat preferences.

Figure 4-3. An example of XChat's nick autocomplete feature: before (left) and after (right) pressing Enter

4.2.4 ChatZilla

ChatZilla provides tab-completion
facilities that are similar to those found in
irssi. It does not cycle through nicks if there
is ambiguity, but completes the nick as far as it can and displays
the available options if you press Tab twice quickly. If the nick is
the first word of a line, ChatZilla suffixes it with a comma.

4.2.5 BitchX

BitchX provides tab-completion
facilities equivalent to those found in mIRC, but does not cycle
through the available options when asked to complete an ambiguous
nick. Instead, like XChat, it displays the available
options.

Steve Jolly