I have moved to another job again (I know, I can not stand still) and in my new company the old IRC is used. Besides all the people inform their status changing their nicks (for example if you go to lunch, your nick username would be modified to username|lunch or something similar). I have to say that it is a mess but... When in Rome do as the Romans do. Pidgin is my favorite program for chatting. It is a very mature program and it saved my ass once in the past so I configured it to join to the different rooms I have to be present. Some plugins were indeed interesting and I also configured them to make my job easier. Nevertheless I did not find anyone to change my nick when I change my general pidgin status.
The ircaway plugin does a similar job, it changes your nick to usernameAway when the IRC status is changed to away. Indeed it would have been enough, but it is not exactly what I wanted. I had defined several statuses in pidgin (for example cofee, lunch, brb, afk, meeting,...) and, when my status is changed to one of them, my nick should be changed accordingly. Looking to some plugins source code it should not be very difficult, so I started to develop one and here it is the result: ircstatus.
The plugin does exactly what I want:
It should be configured with one IRC account (I thought in configuring more than one but I changed my mind, it is not necessary). That account is the one that will receive the nick changes. You can also configure the separator string (by default is "|" but you can configure another one, "_" for example).
The plugin listens for status changes (signal savedstatus-changed) and performs the change of the nick in the IRC account specified in the preferences. Obviously the plugin checks that the IRC account exists and is connected. The new nick is constructed by the concatenation of the initial username, the separator and the title of the status. The title is sanitized (non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by an underscore "_").
And that is all. The plugin is very simple but it works exactly like I want. Besides I can combine it with another plugin away-on-lock which changes automatically your status if the screen-saver is activated. This way my nick is always modified even when I forget to change my status manually, which is quite often because of my bad memory (away-on-lock changes the status to one of the away status, you can configure which one, and in turn my ircstatus changes the nick accordingly). I suppose that such a bothering plugin will not be needed by a lot of people, but you can clone or download it from my github anyway.
Cherio!
Comments