kSirc to do ICQ?

Saturday, 26 July 2003  |  unknow

Hmm, I'm not sure how twisted this is, but I want to do something other than hack irc for a few days. At work everyone is on ICQ, so I run sim to talk to them. But I've never liked the way IM apps run, what was wrong with IRC?!?

Since ksirc really just executes a perl script why can't I just make it execute a different perl script? Say one that talks ICQ? The only thing the ICQ client has to do is accept 3 different commands:

  • /msg
  • /lag
  • /join

For ICQ we can ignore the last 2 and make them noops. Now the ICQ client has to output data in a usefull way:

  • ~nick~ message
  • *I* server message
  • *** generic message
  • *E* error message

Where each ? message can be prifixed with ~nick~ if it relates to a specific person.

This isn't much at all really. Would be nice if all commands too /command format, like /help, etc but we can just modifiy the input parser, maybe?

Every chat session with a user is just an irc query window. Would seem to work...

Now, since ksirc uses perl a perl ICQ client without tons of ascii colour codes is what I want. I found vicq, anyone know any better ones? Clean code, easy to hack and modify. Suggestions?

Pretty twisted huh?