I use Bitlbee. It acts as an IRC server and is the gateway to other services that can be understood in terms to nicks and channels. I use it for Twitter, for example. When I connect, Bitlbee fetches a bunch of older Tweets to fill my timeline. Sadly, highlighting is somehow borked as far as Twitter is concerned. What sort of highlighting you ask? Well, IRC has a convention of allowing some control codes to make stuff bold, italic or coloured. Not everybody uses it, but I installed a plugin for my IRC client, rcirc. This plugin seems to be interfering with the display of the Twitter backlog, sadly.
This screenshot shows the transition between backlog (the bold stuff above) and the “live” messages which are highlighted correctly:
What’s wrong? What can I do to fix this?
1. `M-: (setq rcirc-debug-flag t)`
2. start bitlbee and rcirc
3. switch to the buffer `*rcirc debug*`
4. take a look at the borked messages
For example (translating the real Control-B to `ˆB` for you to read):
`:iamdevloper!iamdevloper@twitter PRIVMSG #twitter_kensanata :^B[^B^B^B12:26:28^B]^B ^B[^B12^B]^B "Now I am become death, the destroyer of *worlds" - the project manager who promised the client early project delivery`
It *seems* to legit, even though those three consecutive `^B` characters are a pain. Well, at least now I know!
I looked at `rcirc-styles` and found that the Emacs Wiki page points to a different repository. Somebody has been maintaining the code. I deleted my code and installed the package, and all is well, now. Yay!
Thanks, Aaron Miller. 😄
#Emacs #Bitlbee #Twitter
