Irssi 1.1.0

These pages have often included updates to the WeeChat IRC client. What makes WeeChat so good is that it runs from a terminal, it's mature, and it's crammed full of features, scripts, and potential. But there has always been one big rival to WeeChat, and one that many users even consider superior, and that's Irssi. Irssi has been around longer than WeeChat, almost two decades, and like WeeChat, its age makes it incredibly stable and secure. Although it is older, it shares many of the same features of WeeChat, including windows, plugins, and horizontal splits, but you'll have to wait for 1.2.0 for the long, long-awaited vertical split. The main difference is configurability; whereas WeeChat may have more features built in, Irssi may need more plugins – apart from its excellent theming – but Irssi does include options WeeChat has to emulate via plugins, such as the excellent set of tools that send message notifications across your desktop and even to your Android phone. (Thanks, IrssiNotifier.)

Terminal IRC clients like WeeChat and Irssi make sense because with IRC you're always dealing with text, which means there's no extra overhead in issuing internal commands for the client from the input prompt, and this is how Irssi works, too. Type /connect followed by the server name, for instance; it's the same for the huge number of internal commands both clients support. It starts off intimidating but quickly works just like any other part of IRC. Irssi 1.1.0 is a major update and includes a year's worth of work, which changes age-old commands, such as the /server command replaced with the /connect command, and adds new commands, such as an accessible global history, where elements can now be deleted. If you've found WeeChat to be just a little too foreboding, try Irssi!

Project Website

https://irssi.org

Terminal IRC clients make a lot of sense because everything remains in the text domain.

Image viewer

qimgv

Image viewers might not seem the most exciting application category, but when you think how many images you typically view each day, choosing one other than the default option for your desktop could save you time as well as a few CPU cycles in the process. Qimgv is a new, cross-platform image editor that's worthy of your consideration, mainly because it's quick and has a super-click user interface that doesn't get in the way of actually viewing images. Click or select an image, and qimgv displays it. If you mouse to the top of the window, preview thumbnails for images found within the same folder appear listed horizontally. This is a great feature because you're seldom looking for a single image in isolation, and very few of us name our picture files anything meaningful, leaving us to scan quickly through folders of similarly named images.

Qimgv also has a great set of keyboard shortcuts for moving between images, zooming in and out, and entering full-screen mode, and it even provides a basic set of editing tools. This is the application's best feature, because you often need to crop or resize an image without wanting to resort to something like Gimp, and that's exactly what these shortcuts enable you to do, as well as copy and paste between directories. The dark theme is also worth mentioning, as is the native support for simple WebM videos. This fledging, royalty-free format needs greater exposure, and while it's a little strange to find video playback in an image viewer, it means you need one less application – especially if you find yourself looking for such a tool on Windows!

Project Website

https://github.com/easymodo/qimgv

A super-fast Qt-based image viewer with support for WebM video playback.