What IRC clients support original IRC-style scrolling?
reddit / irc

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cos · 2016-03-27 19:23

In the early days of IRC, nearly all IRC clients didn't scroll text.
Rather, the position of the "current line" advanced on the screen,
until it reached the bottom, then it wrapped around to the top.  You
could see where the current line was (usually because the line after
it was blanked, but it could be by color), and all the rest of the
text stayed put where it was, until it got overwritten when the
current line reached it.

IRC2 (which for years was the most common client) added a "/set
scroll" option to allow you to switch to standard scrolling, where the
current line is always at the bottom and stuff scrolls off the top.
Later, other IRC clients became more popular and they just had
standard scrolling and didn't do the old irc style at all.  irssi
mostly replaced irc2 for unix text mode irc, and it didn't have irc
style scrolling.

I really like the old style because I hate it when the text I'm
reading keeps moving!  On active channels with lots of conversation
it's very jumpy and annoying.  I much prefer the text I'm looking at
to stay where it is on the screen.  And I still have a very old irc2
install on one of my servers, where I do much of my irc'ing from.

Are there any currently-maintained irc clients that still support
original irc style scrolling?  Which ones?

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[deleted] · 2016-03-27 21:54

[deleted]

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cos · 2016-03-28 01:04

irssi you mean?

I remember writing the author of irssi years ago asking if they'd add
this, and they wrote me back explaining how standard scrolling was so
ingrained in the way it was coded that it'd be a huge overhaul and not
worth the trouble, so irssi would never support original irc style
scrolling.

Did that change?  I'm not finding it in the documentation.  How do you
do it?

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svn · 2016-03-28 02:33

Didn't bitchx do this as well?

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RShotZz · 2016-04-11 00:04

I think WeeChat does

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cos · 2016-04-12 02:12

Do you know how to get weechat to do that?

I installed weechat and it doesn't work that way by default.  Searched
the user guide but either I don't know what terms to look for there,
or it's not there.