X-Chat

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(Redirected from XChat)

X-Chat, commonly written XChat or xchat, is one of the most popular IRC clients for Unix-like systems. It is also available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X (via an offshoot of the project, called X-Chat Aqua, which keeps in sync with the main development branch and is much more popular than the official version maintained by the Fink project). It has a choice of a tabbed or tree interface, support for multiple servers, and a high level of configurability. Both command line and graphical versions are available, although use of the graphical version far outweighs use of the command line version. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and uses the [[GTK+]] toolkit for its interface.

1 Plug-ins
2 Shareware controversy
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

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Plug-ins

X-Chat can be scripted with plug-ins in a number of programming languages: Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ruby, which are available as external plugins and contain a binary module interface, usually for the C programming language.

Plug-ins are capable of hooking into numerous types of events:<ref>XChat 2.0 Plugin Interface</ref>

Server events like NOTICE or numeric codes defined in RFC 1459 such as 376 for end of motd
Command events such as mycmd which allow for adding new commands (run in the input dialog with /command arg1, arg2, ...) or replacing internal commands such as say, the command which implicitly gets run when the user sends messages
Print events listed in the "Text Events" dialog
Timeout events to be called every n milliseconds
Socket or file descriptors

In the case of events like server, command and print events plug-ins can specify whether or not they wish to replace existing functionality or not.

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Shareware controversy

As of August 23, 2004, the official Windows build of X-Chat has become shareware, and must be purchased for USD$20 or AUD$25 after a 30-day trial period. There has been a great deal of discussion about the legality of this move. Since the X-Chat project has not required copyright assignment, the maintainer of the X-Chat project does not actually hold copyright to the entirety of the code. While he has offered to remove and rewrite any patches, provided the author of the patches asks him to, there are many who feel that he is still in violation of the GPL, especially since the code for the shareware enforcement is not disclosed. Unofficial Windows builds of X-Chat are made available (at no cost) by contributors, who maintain binaries of the latest release, and also compile frequently from CVS.

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