If like me, you are a child of the internet generation, you’ve probably found that you have multiple types of “chat” or social media on which people regularly interact with you. This article talks about how you may be able to reduce this to manageable number, using ZNC and Bitlbee.
I recently reviewed my chat applications and found the following:
I previously used a variety of chat clients:
Having all of those chat clients open turned out to be a massive distraction, as I was constantly cycling through the list to find the latest updates or message on any one of the various configured IM networks.
This lead me to the idea of rationalising all of my chats into one client, to reduce the number of places where I would be interacting with chat-type applications.
I first looked at Adium, which is an absolutely awesome chat client for OS X. It has all of the major IM networks I use already configured and it’s possible to make it work with Campfire, IRC, Skype and Twitter. Conceivably that would reduce the number of clients to 1, which would be absolutely awesome, but for the following issues:
I decided what I’d actually prefer, was all my chats to look like IRC, rather than all my IRC to look like chats — but is that really possible?
It turns out the answer is pretty much yes, for my use-case.
Given that you have a server on the internet, you can:
For some uses (e.g. from home), I connect to ZNC from my existing Textual app (it’s actually 3 connections, one for Freenode IRC, one for CamperVan and one for Bitlbee, but it’s sufficiently simple that I can configure a new client from memory just by setting up 3 IRC server connections).
On my work computer, where I’m stuck in a Terminal most of the time, I have taken the time to setup Weechat on the same server as my ZNC bouncer, which enables me to have a single SSH connection open to my server and then to use my existing weechat profile to connect to all my regular IRC networks.
Hopefully the above has given you some ideas about how you can replace every chat client with IRC. Even if you can’t or won’t do that, I would encourage you to simplify your chat needs to as few different programs as possible — you will find the benefits of fewer distractions worth it in the long run.