You can put your loop in an alias, then have that alias call itself with a timer passing the loop index as a parameter. That will "break out of the loop" long enough to do other stuff, such as replying to the Ping? Pong! or updating channel/query windows. Depending on how long you run the loop for compared to how long the timer duration is, you can eventually get it down to where you can only minimally notice a lag in typing/updating even during a long loop.
