Facebook Chat, New Features Land in Latest Release of Smuxi IRC App

By , Published January 14, 2012

IRC Clients are hardly the most glamourous of applications but for many of they they’re an important tool of daily life.

Smuxi, my personal favourite IRC client, has a new release available. It adds a number of new features that make it capable of pleasing the most ardent of IRC users.

Smuxi 0.8.9

Smuxi IRC Client

56 bug reports and 33 feature requests have been dealt with in the latest version of Smuxi.

Initial support for Jabber/XMPP support has been added. This will allow you to chat to your Facebook and gTalk without needing to open a separate app. Smuxi devs wish to note that ‘the implementation is far from complete’, lacks a buddy list (!) and should be considered a ‘technical preview of what will be coming in future Smuxi releases’.

A short video of this feature action can be viewed on the Smuxi website.

An option to enable ‘persistent message buffers‘ – whereby all channel and chat messages, including personal messages, is saved to a database and automatically displayed in Smuxi itself – can be turned on via File > Preferences > Interface. Here, change ”Persistency Type” from “Volatile” to “Persistent”.

Other notable new features in Smuxi 0.8.9 including extending keyboard bindings for switching tabs; support for the IPv6 protocol; NetworkManager support for hassle-free detection of network changes; and a user-friendly way of finding group chats/channels.

Multi-platform fans will appreciate the addition of a Mac OS X build.

General Smuxi Features

Smuxi boasts a wealth of personalisation options. Want chat tabs on the right? Prefer using bash style completion? Want to be notified anytime someone in a channel mentions Llamas? Smuxi can do it.

Ubuntu integration (messaging menu, notifications, etc) is included in the app out of the box.

Install Smuxi 0.8.9

Like it? Want it? Ubuntu 10.04, 11.10 and 12.04 users can install the latest release of Smuxi from its PPA @ launchpad.net/~meebey/+archive/ppa

A Daily PPA is available for anyone interested in getting the latest features (and latest bugs).

Thanks to Mirco

Related posts:

  1. IRC app Smuxi 0.8 released, adds messaging menu support, notifications & lots more!
  2. Smuxi IRC app updates with new features & fixes
  3. Smuxi IRC Client – much of what you expect with a little bit you don’t
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  • http://tomslominski.net/ Tom Slominski

    I hope the Facebook implementation is sturdy. Right now neither Pidgin nor Empathy can deal with it well.

    • Anonymous

      This is most definitely a problem with facebook’s servers.  I’m having so many problems with messages not being delivered by their servers and it leads to many headaches.  Otherwise XMPP is a very sturdy protocol and I have absolutely no problem with messages from e.g. gmail, et. al. 

      • Stijn Verwaaijen

        Same here, fb chat sucks…

      • http://tomslominski.net/ Tom Slominski

        Might be. @LoveLossLetGo:twitter ’s Facebook Chat for BlackBerry fails too, but surprisingly, Go!Chat! for Facebook and Facebook Messenger (well, obviously) work fine on my phone.

  • http://twitter.com/pherin Rob M.

    Unfortunately no Maverick-Packages available -.-

    • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

      I couldn’t find any usage statistics for used Ubuntu versions so I only provided the current development version (precise), newest release (oneiric) and LTS (lucid). If you have pointers where I can find such stats I am open to add more versions!

      • Anonymous

        Providing the packages the way you are doing is fine. It is just that some people stayed on maverick and natty due to Unity/Gnome Shell.

        • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

          Oh, I wasn’t aware of this! I thought they use the GNOME3 fallback mode. I will look into adding maverick and natty packages then. Thanks for this information.

        • http://droiddev.co.cc CuriousCursor

           And to be able to compile Android 4.0.1 :/

    • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ActionParsnip ActionParsnip

      What’s the point? It’s only supoprted for little under 3 months…

  • http://twitter.com/mashengky Hengky Kusuma

    i hate facebook chat.. 

  • PramukaITS Surabaya

    Is it compatible for proxy connection…? hehe

    • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

      Yes it is, it even automatically detects your proxy settings! I forgot to mention that in the official release notes :-/

  • Anonymous

    Does anyone know an IRC client that is not with monospaced font?
    Is there by the way any reason for this?

    • Levi Bard

      Most GUI IRC clients allow users to set the font. I imagine that the default is often monospaced for maximal readability.

      • Anonymous

        makes it easier to read source code? programmers love IRC …

    • http://thomasboxley.com/ Thomas Boxley

      Pidgin.

      Smuxi and Xchat can be configured to use a sans-serif font though.

    • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

      Sure, Smuxi allows you to change the font to anything you like. By default IRC clients use monospaced fonts to allow character alignment between multiple lines of text. It’s your decision though what you want to use.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_YJCPDO23NUCLQV6ELZQB4IDIVQ A_T1

    I like smuxi the only thing that bugs me is the time-stamp is not indented in relation to the text in the channel.

  • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer
  • aperson

    Who needs an irc client with built in xmpp, when you can just use bitlbee and use whatever client you want? :-)  ZNC + Bitlbee + xchat is all I need to stay in touch with people (besides a web browser, that is).

  • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

    I have added more screencasts showing how to use some of the new features of Smuxi 0.8.9

    Facebook Chat:
    http://www.smuxi.org/screencasts/facebook-chat/

    GTalk:
    http://www.smuxi.org/screencasts/gtalk/

    Twitter:
    http://www.smuxi.org/screencasts/twitter/

  • http://twitter.com/heikkiket Heikki Ketoharju

    Pro tip:
    Go to File->Preferences->Interface->Output
    and change background color to #300A24 and foreground color to white. In the same place you can also change font to Ubuntu Mono if you prefer. Voilà: Ubuntu-style Smuxi!

    • http://twitter.com/meebey Mirco Bauer

      Should think about making this default for the Ubuntu package :-)

      • http://twitter.com/heikkiket Heikki Ketoharju

        Well, why not? I like the default font, though: it’s nice to read different font on irc after a long command-line session. But maybe Ubuntu-font could be default also? Not everyone uses command line at all…

 
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