If you would do a quick analysis on which programs I use the most you’d probably get Firefox, Quassel, Amarok and Kopete (in this order and Firefox being way ahead of everything else). Using those programs extensively of course leads to optimizing workflows.
Quassel is the fourth IRC client I use now. MIRC back on Windows. Then I learned to love Konversation when I switched to Linux. At some point I got tired of missing stuff when I was offline so I got shell access on a friends server to run irssi. It was ok and I customized the hell out of it to fit my needs pretty perfectly but I always missed Konversation’s nice GUI. I’m just not the type that really enjoys a CLI app (well except for listadmin maybe – but more about that another time). And then came Quassel, developed by a good friend of mine. I got a GUI and always-online in one app without hacks. Heaven! Well ok – close to heaven. There were a few usability issues that thankfully got fixed with help by Celeste. But one thing is still problematic: Quassel keeps all queries (private chats) in your default channel list. (Konversation had (has?) this nice feature that it closes inactive queries after a while and they are gone after a restart anyway so your channel list doesn’t grow too huge.) With a huge list of queries (not hard to achieve if you’re using IRC for a while) you easily miss new messages in Quassel. Since I noticed a few people having this problem I’ll share how I tuned my Quassel to never miss queries again.
I have 2 chat lists. One with all my channels and queries and another one with only new stuff – that means unread channels and queries. It looks like this:
Once I read and leave the queries again they are removed from the news chat list – same for the channels. A nice side effect of this is that I can easily manage a lot of channels even on the small screen on my netbook without scrolling.
To set this up go to View -> Chat Lists -> Configure Chat Lists.
Settings for my All Buffers chat list:
Settings for my news chat list:
How about a list of only new queries? Easy:
How about a chat lists with only channels with highlights? There you go:
Enjoy and never get angry looks from friends again for missing a query 😉
How did you tune Quassel?
I’ve got separate docks for channels and queries and my chat monitor shows only stuff highlighting me or in a query. I guess that does something similar to your setup but with even less screen real estate. then again, I doubt I get pinged as much as you do.
Hehe possibly 😉
Can you configure your chat monitor to show highlights that you got while you were disconnected?