ERC is a powerful, modular, and extensible IRC client for Emacs. It supports multiple channel-buffers, nick completion, keyword highlighting, and more.
The software is written in Emacs Lisp. This makes it very easy to extend, customise and adapt ERC to your own personal style. A useful feature of ERC is that you can extend the set of commands available on your IRC prompt by writing your own short Emacs Lisp functions.
ERC maintains a separate buffer for each open IRC channel and direct conversation. A sophisticated mechanism is used to indicate activity in currently hidden buffers in the mode-line, called Channel Tracking.
Features include:
- Works with both Emacs and XEmacs.
- Multi channels / multi servers: every channel is put in a separate buffer; several IRC servers can be used simultaneously.
- Queries: private conversations are treated as channels, and are put into private buffers.
- Flood control.
- Timestamps.
- Join channels automatically.
- Buttonize URLs, nicknames, and other text.
- Wrap long lines.
- Highlight or remove IRC control characters.
- Highlight pals, fools, and other keywords.
- Detect netsplits.
- Complete nicknames and commands in a programmable fashion.
- Make displayed lines read-only.
- Input history.
- Track channel activity in the mode-line.
- Highlighting: some occurrences of words can be highlighted, therefore easing conversation tracking.
- Notification: ERC can notify you that users are online.
- Channel tracking: channels can be hidden and conversation continue in the background. You are notified when something is said in such a hidden channel.
- Nick completion: ERC can complete words so as to ease the writing of nicknames.
- History: past actions are kept in history rings for future use.
- Multi languages: messages are multilingual and can be customized.
- User scripting: users can load scripts (e.g. auto greeting scripts) at ERC startup.
Website: www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ERC
Support: Manual
Developer: Gergely Nagy, Adrian Aichner, Andreas Fuchs, Benjamin Drieu, and many others
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Return to Console Based IRC Clients Home Page
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